Speaker 1: Let's imagine none of this is true. We're still going
Speaker 1: to learn something about why people have out of body experiences,
Speaker 1: or think they're in telepathic contact with their loved ones,
Speaker 1: or go to a medium and think they've contacted the dead.
Speaker 1: We're going to learn something interesting about psychology. And that's
Speaker 1: true of magic. You know, when you study magicians and
Speaker 1: how they manipulate attention and all sorts of other things,
Speaker 1: you're learning about psychology, and people are fascinated by this stuff.
Speaker 1: What psychologists are really good at, academic psychologists is taking
Speaker 1: people who I find very interesting in our lives and emotions,
Speaker 1: and we love and we hate, and we have beliefs
Speaker 1: that aren't true, and we argue with people and we
Speaker 1: get on with people, and so taking all of that
Speaker 1: buzzing complexity and reducing it to something really quite dull,
Speaker 1: and so that saddens me. And a lot of my
Speaker 1: work is about trying to celebrate the role of people
Speaker 1: in society and keep psychology interesting. I mean, that's why
Speaker 1: I got into it in the first place. You know,
Speaker 1: I read these things, and yet psychologists have this rather
Speaker 1: uncanny ability to take something as interesting and convert into
Speaker 1: something quite dull.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 2: Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist interested in the science of intelligence,
Speaker 2: creativity and human potential. Today we have doctor Richard Wiseman
Speaker 2: on the podcast. Doctor Wiseman holds Britain's only professorship in
Speaker 2: the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire
Speaker 2: and has published over one hundred academic papers examining the
Speaker 2: psychology of magic and illusion, deception, luck, and self development.
Speaker 2: Doctor Wiseman has written several popular psychology books, including The
Speaker 2: Luck Factor, Paranormality, Why We See What Isn't There, Quircology,
Speaker 2: Shoot for the Moon and Rip It Up, The Radically
Speaker 2: New Approach to Changing Your Life. I've been a longtime
Speaker 2: admirer of doctor Wiseman's wide ranging research on magic, well
Speaker 2: being and success in life. As you will see in
Speaker 2: this episode, we share a lot of mutual interests. I
Speaker 2: really enjoyed chatting with doctor Wiseman, and I know you
Speaker 2: will enjoy listening to our discussion. So that further ado
Speaker 2: I bring you Doctor Richard Wiseman, Professor Richard wise Man.
Speaker 2: It is so so good to have you on the
Speaker 2: Secondlogy Podcast.
Speaker 1: Finally pleasure, pleasure to be here, and greetings from and
Speaker 1: not very sunny Edinburgh in Scotland, which is where I
Speaker 1: find myself.
Speaker 2: It's not sunny, but I do love Edinburgh.
Speaker 1: I love it. It's a very very beautiful city and
Speaker 1: I'm lucky enough to live right in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah. Every year the Fringe Festival rolls into
Speaker 1: town and thousands of shows all over the city. But
Speaker 1: right now it's a fairly quiet time, particularly as it's
Speaker 1: quite late at night.
Speaker 2: Wonderful. Well, we have so many areas of mutual interest.
Speaker 2: I have a great and rest in magic and a
Speaker 2: great interest. I see you on the Facebook groups I'm on,
Speaker 2: you know, and I'm like, oh, there's Richard. You know
Speaker 2: the magic the secret magic groups. Won't mention what any
Speaker 2: of them are called.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, the interconnected world of magic. Yes, the small world.
Speaker 1: It's incredible, it's it is.
Speaker 2: It is remarkably small, and everyone's trying to, you know,
Speaker 2: make sure that we keep the secrets, keep the secrets.
Speaker 2: But also psychology and the psychology of success. That's a
Speaker 2: very very common area of interest. Not common, that's a
Speaker 2: mutual area of interest of ours. Is the maybe some
Speaker 2: of the unexpogant talk today about some of some unexpected
Speaker 2: things that people, you know, might not realize really matters
Speaker 2: for success. And maybe we'll talk about some of the
Speaker 2: things that everyone says matters for success and maybe it
Speaker 2: doesn't matter so much. So that'd be great to have
Speaker 2: that conversation. So that's that's all, just uh preamble, you know,
Speaker 2: just setting the stage, setting the stage.
Speaker 1: Letting people know what's going to happen.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. Well you're you're you're a lifelong entertainer.
Speaker 2: So I want to start there a little bit to
Speaker 2: your childhood, because you were a street performer when you
Speaker 2: were what twelve, no.
Speaker 1: A little bit older than that. I got into magic
Speaker 1: when I was probably eight or nine something like that,
Speaker 1: and by my grandfather, who showed me a very good
Speaker 1: magic trick. Hearly knew one magic trick, but it's a
Speaker 1: very good one. A coin that would disappear and appear
Speaker 1: in a nest of boxes. And so I kind of
Speaker 1: badgered him every weekend to just tell me how this
Speaker 1: trick was done. He wouldn't do that. Eventually, he said
Speaker 1: the secrets in the local library. So I went and
Speaker 1: read everything about magic and That's how I got hooked
Speaker 1: on it, and it is an amazing hobby. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've just written a book on all the kind of
Speaker 1: benefits of learning magic, and they are sizable, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of confidence, in terms of problem solving, getting
Speaker 1: a can do attitude, and so on. So I got
Speaker 1: into magic, got into a local magic club, and then
Speaker 1: went to study psychology because of magic. Actually, I read
Speaker 1: a book that said, as handed magicians are likable and
Speaker 1: so therefore you should read How to Win Friends and
Speaker 1: Influence People by Doubt Canigi, which is an amazing book.
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's dated now, but it's incredible. That
Speaker 1: and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living his other book,
Speaker 1: both of them incredible. So I read those then when
Speaker 1: I studied psychology at University College London, which is right
Speaker 1: in the middle of London, and the reason for that
Speaker 1: is that it's very close to the Magic Circle and
Speaker 1: also very close to Covent Garden, which is an area
Speaker 1: in London where all the street entertainers are, and so
Speaker 1: in my summer breaks I would go and do street
Speaker 1: entertaining down there. I guess they're in my sort of
Speaker 1: early teens, and I was pretty awful. I was pretty
Speaker 1: bad at it's it's a hard way of making a
Speaker 1: living because people can walk off, you know, they don't
Speaker 1: like what you're doing, They just they wander off, and
Speaker 1: they did in large numbers when I was doing street entertaining.
Speaker 1: So I did that. And then I mean, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about sort of as you say, success, but in terms
Speaker 1: of opportunity. You know, most of the opportunities that have
Speaker 1: come my way have been by chance. And so at
Speaker 1: the end of my degree, I was walking along my
Speaker 1: friend was walking in the opposite direction and bumped into
Speaker 1: him and he said, you know, that's the weirdest thing.
Speaker 1: I've just seen this poster for a pH d position,
Speaker 1: which would be perfect for you studying the psychology of
Speaker 1: magic up in Edinburgh. And I often think, well, you know,
Speaker 1: if that somebody hadn't put that post up, or he
Speaker 1: hadn't walked that route, or I hadn't walked the route
Speaker 1: and bumped into him, I wouldn't have known about that opportunity.
Speaker 1: This is all prior to email and so on and
Speaker 1: the web. And so this was a professor up in
Speaker 1: Edinburgh who's doing work on the paranormal wanted a magician
Speaker 1: and so I came up to here and studied psychology
Speaker 1: and magic for four years. That's my pH d. And
Speaker 1: then after that went back down to the University of
Speaker 1: Hertfordshire and did some of the research which a spect
Speaker 1: you may I read about. So that that's my kind
Speaker 1: of career in terms of magic and psychology coming together.
Speaker 2: I love it. What was the name of your advisory.
Speaker 1: Up here is Professor Robert Morris who was the Curseler
Speaker 1: Professor of parapsychology. So Bob was. I don't think he
Speaker 1: believed in paranormal stuff or not. He's certainly very open
Speaker 1: to it, but he also knew that lots of the
Speaker 1: psychics and mediums and so on were cheats, and he
Speaker 1: wanted someone to do some work on psychology and magic
Speaker 1: so he could sort of separate the two outs. And
Speaker 1: what was amazing about that experience, I was working in
Speaker 1: a parapsychology unit, which is the psychology of the paranormal. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm skeptical about that stuff, most tragicians are. I was
Speaker 1: deeply skeptical, and you I was surrounded by people who
Speaker 1: kind of believed that stuff. And I think it's very
Speaker 1: healthy to be working an area and to meet people
Speaker 1: whose belief systems you don't share, because it kind of
Speaker 1: teaches you how to be tolerant and respectful when you
Speaker 1: don't agree with somebody. So it set me in a
Speaker 1: good kind of stead for that. So yeah, that was
Speaker 1: Bob Morris up here, and that was four glorious years
Speaker 1: doing psychology and magic stuff.
Speaker 2: That's so cool. I feel like the psychology of the
Speaker 2: paranormal is a very fringe area of psychology. When I
Speaker 2: go to the APA conferences, I just don't meet many
Speaker 2: paranormal psychologists.
Speaker 1: That's definitely true. Yeah, probably. I mean I was doing
Speaker 1: it's probably about fifty people. Now there's probably about twenty
Speaker 1: people around the world. So yes, it's not an area
Speaker 1: that attracts many people.
Speaker 2: It's not an area that attracts many people. Yet, Like,
Speaker 2: if there is something to this, then like it's like
Speaker 2: the most important thing. That's the interesting thing about this
Speaker 2: is like it's you know, it's the most fringe area.
Speaker 2: But let's say a psychologist does someday actually find something
Speaker 2: that replicates within the parent because yeah, no one's replicating
Speaker 2: this shit. Well let's say soone actually replicates. Well, then
Speaker 2: it's like wait a minute, hold on, maybe we should
Speaker 2: now focus on this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now that that's true, it has the opportunity or
Speaker 1: the possibility of revolutionizing exactly obviously the mind and so on.
Speaker 1: But you do need evidence, good evidence. I don't believe
Speaker 1: the evidence is there for extrasensory perception. But Bob's argument,
Speaker 1: even back then, this would have been the late eighties,
Speaker 1: early nineties, his argument was, I think it's true. Let's
Speaker 1: imagine none of this is true. We're still going to
Speaker 1: learn something about why people have out of body experiences
Speaker 1: or think they're in telepathic contact with their loved ones,
Speaker 1: or go to a medium and think they've contacted the dead.
Speaker 1: We're going to learn something interesting about psychology. And that's
Speaker 1: true of magic. You know, when you study magicians and
Speaker 1: how they manipulate attention and all sorts of other things,
Speaker 1: you're learning about psychology, and people are fascinated by this stuff.
Speaker 1: What psychologists are really good at, academic psychologists is taking
Speaker 1: people who I find very interesting in our lives and emotions,
Speaker 1: and we love and we hate, and we have beliefs
Speaker 1: that aren't true, and we argue with people and we
Speaker 1: get on with people, and so taking all of that
Speaker 1: buzzing complexity and reducing it to something really quite dull,
Speaker 1: and so that saddens me. And a lot of my
Speaker 1: work is about trying to celebrate the role of people
Speaker 1: in society and keep psychology interesting. I mean, that's why
Speaker 1: I got into it in the first place. You know,
Speaker 1: I read these things, and yet psychologists have this rather
Speaker 1: uncanny ability to take something as interesting and converting into
Speaker 1: something quite dull.
Speaker 2: Well, you're so right. I mean, you're the literally, you're
Speaker 2: the professor of public understanding at your university. Yes, yes,
Speaker 2: and uh, you know, like you literally I've never heard
Speaker 2: of that, but maybe Richard Dawkins the only other time
Speaker 2: I ever heard of someone who was a professor of
Speaker 2: like public you know, why the public should care about something, and.
Speaker 1: Him Richard started he was public understanding science, I think,
Speaker 1: and then when I got my professorship, I went with
Speaker 1: public understanding of psychology because it allows me to move
Speaker 1: in many different spheres. But also, you know, fundamentally, people
Speaker 1: should be so honored and excited to study psychology. When
Speaker 1: I first speak to undergraduates on their first day in
Speaker 1: the university, they're all excited. And then when you speak
Speaker 1: to them in year three or year four, they've kind
Speaker 1: of lost that excitement and it's all become a little
Speaker 1: bit dull. And I think that's because psychology is quite
Speaker 1: a lot of it isn't very interesting. So I always
Speaker 1: think we should remember why we're doing this stuff, and
Speaker 1: how wonderful, you know, how wonderful brains are, how wonderful
Speaker 1: minds are. We've got no idea how the brain creates
Speaker 1: the mind. We don't really have very much an idea
Speaker 1: of how brains work, and we're still only scratching the
Speaker 1: surface in terms of the complexity and getting our heads
Speaker 1: around that. So yeah, I always sort of choose topics
Speaker 1: that I find interesting and I think other people will
Speaker 1: find interesting. For that reason, I don't do much work on,
Speaker 1: you know, short term memory, because I would find it
Speaker 1: difficult to bring that live.
Speaker 2: But you did write a book on helping people with
Speaker 2: their memory memory.
Speaker 1: I forgot about that. Yes, that's eronic crazy, yes, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: a short book on memory. But again, it was about
Speaker 1: how to improve your memory, right, Well, it wasn't about
Speaker 1: you know, the intricacies of how memories long.
Speaker 2: Term Well, exactly, that's right, that's it. Well, I know
Speaker 2: I find the well, I definitely find the topics study
Speaker 2: interesting for sure. I remember, it's just a shame in
Speaker 2: psychology that we don't in grad school promote people more
Speaker 2: or encourage encouraged students who want to do public outreach
Speaker 2: of their science. When I was in grad school, I
Speaker 2: started blogging for Psychology Today, right when that blog network started,
Speaker 2: and my advisor called me into his office and he's like,
Speaker 2: we need to talk, like, you know, this is really
Speaker 2: you're really out there, you know, in this department for
Speaker 2: doing this, and you realize this is going to hurt
Speaker 2: your your chances at tenure, and and you know, it
Speaker 2: turns out he was right, But I mean that was.
Speaker 1: True of me. When I finished by parapsychology stuff in
Speaker 1: ninety two, I was looking for a job. It turns
Speaker 1: out nobody wants to employ a parapsychologist or something that's
Speaker 1: done to work. And so it is that that is
Speaker 1: totally true that the system is set up for a
Speaker 1: certain type of psychology. Were publish in certain types of
Speaker 1: journals and get certain types of grant and if you're
Speaker 1: going to sit outside of that, it can be quite challenging.
Speaker 1: But you know that the key question to me is, well,
Speaker 1: why are you're doing anything? Quite frankly, what makes something meaningful?
Speaker 1: And when you ask that psychologist, their answer is, well,
Speaker 1: because I published journal articles and I get grants. That's
Speaker 1: the end point. The end point isn't to understand or
Speaker 1: to celebrate humanity. And so the number of times people
Speaker 1: are confused when you go, well, let's just forget about
Speaker 1: the articles and the why are you studying this? And
Speaker 1: people just psychologists look kind of a bit bewilled and go,
Speaker 1: I'm just doing it because that's to get those publications,
Speaker 1: get those grants, and that's how you get on. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it'd be nice if there was a dramatic
Speaker 1: change in my lifetime of encouraging people to think about
Speaker 1: why they're doing what they're doing and what is meaningful?
Speaker 2: Well, that would be nice, wouldn't that be nice? Yeah, well,
Speaker 2: sign me up for that. That that club I view
Speaker 2: you as part of a tradition of that includes James Randy,
Speaker 2: the Amazing Randy, and includes Banacheck. And but it's it's
Speaker 2: a it's a smaller club than that because you're a
Speaker 2: psychologist who was formerly I mean, they I put you
Speaker 2: in this sort of tradition because they you know, James
Speaker 2: Randy tried to test to see some of those bullshit,
Speaker 2: but he didn't really do rigorous double blind me for TV. Look,
Speaker 2: I'm going to show you how I'm smarter than you.
Speaker 2: You know that you're dumb, that you wired and that. Look,
Speaker 2: I'm the amazing Randy. But with all due respect, I
Speaker 2: have a lot of respect for him. But that's what
Speaker 2: the TV show is about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I'm not quite the same as that.
Speaker 2: I mean, look at me.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, I mean I suppose in terms of
Speaker 1: going back, I'd probably close to Ray him and Jim
Speaker 1: Orcock people like that who were and still are doing
Speaker 1: that kind of work within psychology. We should say, though,
Speaker 1: Randy who and I knew James very well. You know,
Speaker 1: it was an amazing guy. I mean, it was the
Speaker 1: amazing Randy. But he's amazing in many many ways. And
Speaker 1: one is he just very charismatic, very clear thinking, very bright,
Speaker 1: and had a great ability to take skepticism and make
Speaker 1: it exciting on the media. And that is not an
Speaker 1: easy thing to do. I mean, it's more exciting to
Speaker 1: talk about why ghosts are real than why they may
Speaker 1: not exist. But James could bring that alive. You know
Speaker 1: that famous line of people prefer the bunk to the
Speaker 1: d bunk where he was able to overcome that. And
Speaker 1: he was great, and some of these investigations are very
Speaker 1: brave as well. He went after people that he knew
Speaker 1: were going to kind of come back at him. So yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a good, big, big fan of his work.
Speaker 1: Banichick is wonderful as well, really talented. Have you ever
Speaker 1: seen Banichick doing the spoon bending, which I saw in
Speaker 1: Vegas a few years ago. My goodness, it's really good.
Speaker 1: It's really really good. But yeah, you are right. My roots,
Speaker 1: I suppose, because they're in academia, will be closer to
Speaker 1: people like Ray him and Jim l Kock who'd come
Speaker 1: more from that that kind of tradition.
Speaker 2: And I was very careful and what I said, because
Speaker 2: I could have easily just put you in the camp of, oh,
Speaker 2: you come from the tradition of Daryl Bem But I
Speaker 2: don't feel like you come from the tradition of Daryl
Speaker 2: in a sense in a sense because in one sense, yes,
Speaker 2: because you're both rigorous scientists, right, But another sense is
Speaker 2: that I feel like you're even more critical of it,
Speaker 2: of it than he is.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean, Darre's not particularly critical. Now, I mean,
Speaker 1: he starts off, I think, being quite skeptical. He's very
Speaker 1: good magician. It was actually taught I think by Slodini,
Speaker 1: and does some great magic. Yeah, I think, I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's right. Certainly I've seen him do Sladini,
Speaker 1: which we should explain to people is a very particular
Speaker 1: type of magic. I've seen him do those those those
Speaker 1: sorts of routines. And Darrell's great published main parapsychological papers
Speaker 1: suggesting there was something to it in mainstream journals and
Speaker 1: inadvertently kicked off the current crisis in replication in psychology
Speaker 1: because people looked at those articles started to criticize his research, saying, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe he looked at the data pre analyzed it,
Speaker 1: or he's not reporting everything, or whatever it is. And
Speaker 1: then other people went old on a minute, that may
Speaker 1: be true of that parapsychological work, but it's also true
Speaker 1: of a lot of psychology as well, And so that
Speaker 1: kicked off this whole kind of we need to be
Speaker 1: able to replicate and need to look critically our own studies,
Speaker 1: And now that's become a huge movement, and because of
Speaker 1: that movement, psychologists now are talking about a thing called preregistration,
Speaker 1: which is where you write down what you're going to do,
Speaker 1: the way in which you're going to analyze data, and
Speaker 1: so on before you conduct the study. And the full
Speaker 1: circle on it is that parapsychologists were doing that for
Speaker 1: fifteen years many many years ago, I mean pro twenty
Speaker 1: years ago. Now they ran those sorts of systems because
Speaker 1: they knew there were problems with the data. So it's
Speaker 1: another way to which parapsychology can kind of overlap with psychology.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just on a nerdy note, pregistration is kind of
Speaker 2: like mentalism. I mean, aren't they making a prediction? We
Speaker 2: predict this will be our hypothesis.
Speaker 1: Correct, that's right, yes, But unlike mentalism, it's quite hard
Speaker 1: to change that prediction. So so so yeah, it's an
Speaker 1: attempt to kind of sort if it.
Speaker 2: Was right, If it goes right, you know it looks impressive.
Speaker 1: You make a big fuss, that's right. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So Daryl contributed to that. And actually, weirdly, there's another
Speaker 1: overlap there because before you go into parapsychology, Darrel was
Speaker 1: doing stuff on self perception theory, which is this notion
Speaker 1: that you figure out how you feel by looking at
Speaker 1: how you're acting. So it's this idea that if you
Speaker 1: force your face into a smile, then you cheer yourself
Speaker 1: up because you look at yourself. I think I'm smiling,
Speaker 1: I must be happy. And he did some great work
Speaker 1: on that, quite early work. And then one of my
Speaker 1: books was about entirely about self perception theory, the rip
Speaker 1: it Up Book, or called the Asif Principle and states.
Speaker 1: So I interviewed Daryl for that when I did that book.
Speaker 1: It was odd talking to him entirely about that and
Speaker 1: not about parapsychology because that's not viewing. But no, it
Speaker 1: is great.
Speaker 2: Have you ever talked to him about parents because you're
Speaker 2: a rep You have a study right that found it
Speaker 2: didn't replicate. Weren't an author on that at Cothora?
Speaker 1: Well yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we didn't replicate stuff. No,
Speaker 1: I've spoken to Daryl and we did summer schools together
Speaker 1: in America on parapsychology, so I know him reasonably well.
Speaker 1: And yeah, this is what I mean. We within parapsychology.
Speaker 1: I don't see eye to i with most parapsychologists in
Speaker 1: terms of whether this stuff is true. But you have
Speaker 1: to sit down the room and have a conversation with
Speaker 1: somebody without shouting. And that's a that's a useful skill.
Speaker 1: I mean, we all know about confirmation bias. We love
Speaker 1: to surround ourselves with people that agree with us. And
Speaker 1: I mean talking going back to success. I know I'm
Speaker 1: not going to name them. I know two very very
Speaker 1: famous magicians and I went to see their shows, and
Speaker 1: I go and see them, see them afterwards. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna say who is. I'm not gonna say who is?
Speaker 1: Uh and uh. Each of them said to me, what
Speaker 1: do you think of the show? And so there's always
Speaker 1: this tradition that you say nice things about someone's show.
Speaker 1: And I said, I enjoyed this, and both of them
Speaker 1: cut me dead. I said, never mind about that. What
Speaker 1: did you hate? What can I change tomorrow? And that
Speaker 1: they were at the top of their game, and all
Speaker 1: they're interested in is what can I change? How can
Speaker 1: I improve? And it's an odd skill. It's it's something
Speaker 1: that we don't embrace easily as saying to somebody, yeah,
Speaker 1: but how can I get how to get better? What
Speaker 1: do you disagree with about what I'm what I'm doing?
Speaker 1: Not what do you agree with? We all want to
Speaker 1: be surrounded by people that go, oh, you're wonderful, you're great.
Speaker 1: Actually you learn far more from the people that go yeah,
Speaker 1: not for me. So that was always an important lesson.
Speaker 2: Well, then that's an importent lesson and about success. I mean,
Speaker 2: and if you look at anyone who's really successful, you
Speaker 2: look at like even you know, things basketball players. I
Speaker 2: feel like that was Kobe Bryant's mentality. You know, it's like,
Speaker 2: you know, they always wanting to change and improve.
Speaker 1: It's hard to do, though. It's easy to say.
Speaker 2: It's hard to do.
Speaker 1: And I've done shows. You meet people afterwards and you
Speaker 1: love it when they go, oh my goodness, that was
Speaker 1: great and that was funny. It's really hard to go, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what what didn't you like? What didn't you What can
Speaker 1: I do better? It's hard to do. It's easy to
Speaker 1: say and hard to do.
Speaker 2: It's true, especially the more personal The comment is yeah,
Speaker 2: you know totally, yeah, no, for sure. So where are
Speaker 2: we at with the evidence on this? So I try
Speaker 2: to look at you know, I started with your ninety
Speaker 2: nine paper, Does s I exist? P s I? How's
Speaker 2: it pronounced?
Speaker 1: A SI?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah? Does SI exist? Lack of replication of an
Speaker 2: anomalous process of information transfer. I saw your eyes by
Speaker 2: the way, trying to think all the way back to
Speaker 2: ninety nine that this.
Speaker 1: Happens a lot. Okay, what what's about to happen? Happens
Speaker 1: a lot now, which is somebody asked me the other
Speaker 1: day about a book that I'd written, and it was
Speaker 1: I'd written in the kind of mid nineties, and I
Speaker 1: was thinking, I can't remember, and I you know, I
Speaker 1: don't even I don't even remember writing the book the
Speaker 1: contents of it. So yeah, particularly with papers like that,
Speaker 1: but I do remember that that was that's the metro
Speaker 1: analysis again.
Speaker 2: The studies, Just in case you forgot, I wrote a
Speaker 2: sentence from the abstract. The studies failed to confirm his
Speaker 2: mean effect of participants scoring above chance on the ESP task.
Speaker 2: So you looked at a whole bunch of Now that
Speaker 2: that was before the bemuh, the big the one that
Speaker 2: made the big splash, right, which was more recent.
Speaker 1: No, I think that is.
Speaker 2: Oh was that was that? Oh? That was maybe that
Speaker 2: was that was a direct replication of that.
Speaker 1: Now now we are getting in stuff I can't remember.
Speaker 1: So I thought that paper that you got there, well,
Speaker 1: what's the title of it again?
Speaker 2: Does side exist lack of replication of an anomalous process
Speaker 2: of information transfer.
Speaker 1: That's the metro analysis all, okay stuff. Yeah, the the
Speaker 1: BEM stuff is about feeling the future, which is was
Speaker 1: much later on, so later that was about again, yes,
Speaker 1: that's right. So that one I think I'm right is
Speaker 1: about meta analysis where you put lots of studies together
Speaker 1: and when we put them together, we found a kind
Speaker 1: of null effect. And then there's lots and lots of
Speaker 1: endless debate about that paper. I think it's still one
Speaker 1: of my most cited papers because so many people have
Speaker 1: disagreed with it and got to arguments about it. So
Speaker 1: it's a very contentious paper. And actually one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why I left the field. I don't do much
Speaker 1: parasitology now because it was so unpleasant to be consistently
Speaker 1: opening your email and as criticism and argument, and I
Speaker 1: was going to conferences and arguing about it, and after
Speaker 1: a while I was just thinking, I don't really want
Speaker 1: to spend my entire life arguing about this stuff. And
Speaker 1: then that's where I moved into the luck work and
Speaker 1: some of the more sort of positive aspects of change.
Speaker 1: Because after about ten twelve years in parapsychology. I thought
Speaker 1: I'd said everything I needed to say, and you know,
Speaker 1: like literally, these beliefs really do matter to some people.
Speaker 1: And so the debates do get quite heated sometimes it does.
Speaker 2: And you know, there are such a part the worry
Speaker 2: right now of the telepathy tapes, and I want to
Speaker 2: get that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't know about them other than yeah, I haven't
Speaker 1: listened to them or anything like that. But isn't it
Speaker 1: amazing that this stuff, you know, that the unsinkable rubber
Speaker 1: duck hypothesis. You know, you keep on batting it down,
Speaker 1: it keeps on coming back in different forms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well you do keep batting it down. You took
Speaker 2: on their gangs felts. Can you just describe the methodology
Speaker 2: of a gangs felt? So so on listening to know
Speaker 2: what what? How do we test for this stuff?
Speaker 1: Okay, so testing for this stuff is complicated with the
Speaker 1: gangs felt normally, not always, but normally you're doing send
Speaker 1: a receiver telepathy type study. You take one person and
Speaker 1: you put them with sort of into a gags felt state.
Speaker 1: You put half ping pong balls over their eyes, you
Speaker 1: put white noise into their ears, you put a red
Speaker 1: light into their face. And it allows them to turn
Speaker 1: their attention inwards and they talk about the thoughts and
Speaker 1: images that come to mind for whatever it is. Twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: In another room, you have what's called the sender who's
Speaker 1: given a randomly selected video clip or picture to look at,
Speaker 1: and then at the end of the day you look
Speaker 1: at the correspondence between that clip and what was being
Speaker 1: said by the receiver. And I won't go into the
Speaker 1: stats of it, but you should get about twenty five
Speaker 1: percent hits. One in four of those trials should be
Speaker 1: and what's called a hit. When you run those studies,
Speaker 1: some people getting thirty two percent, thirty five percent, and
Speaker 1: that was statistically significant. I it suggested that psychic ability existed.
Speaker 1: Our analysis didn't show that. And that's where it all
Speaker 1: started to get a word nasty. But Gansfort studies are
Speaker 1: still going on, and the debate is still going on.
Speaker 2: Oh, the debate is still very much going on. Yeah,
Speaker 2: people will still people will keep pointing out to me,
Speaker 2: but what about jb Ryan's work? What about Jim you know?
Speaker 2: And I read you know, I read Reach of the Mind.
Speaker 2: It's actually one one of my favorite books. I have
Speaker 2: on my bookshelf whenever I do my esp mentalism. I
Speaker 2: give a whole story about you know, this is actually
Speaker 2: how they tested for this, and and and the argument
Speaker 2: I keep getting from from the scientists who are also believers,
Speaker 2: you know, is that you know, just in meta analysis
Speaker 2: doesn't invalidate you know, the ones that like it. We
Speaker 2: did find it, like we saw it with our own eyes.
Speaker 2: You know, you can't, like, no men analysis can strike
Speaker 2: that from the record. So I find it hard, like
Speaker 2: to do what to do with that? Like, how can
Speaker 2: we ever progress the field if we're just arguing meta
Speaker 2: analysis versus those who are like, but I found the
Speaker 2: effect at one point. Just because you know, on average
Speaker 2: there's it's a chance, doesn't mean that we didn't find it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I, if I understand your question correctly, is
Speaker 1: how you are I mean a lot of paris ecologists
Speaker 1: have had personal experience of this stuff, so they've had
Speaker 1: experience which that they think proves side and after that
Speaker 1: they're out to prove it, and experiments are a way
Speaker 1: of doing that and investigating this leg stability. But I
Speaker 1: think one has to park that and argue it on
Speaker 1: the evidence. And one of the things that parapsychology shows
Speaker 1: us is evidence can be a bit squishier than we thought,
Speaker 1: and just arguing on evidence can get problematic. So you know,
Speaker 1: Ben did his studies that we spoke about earlier on.
Speaker 1: Since then he's tried to replicate it quite rightly. He
Speaker 1: with two large scale replications that haven't worked, and so
Speaker 1: the evidence for that doesn't look so good. But that's
Speaker 1: what we have to fall back on. And the scientific method,
Speaker 1: particularly in psychology, isn't very accurate. You know, it's squishy.
Speaker 1: There will be errors. What we believe today we're probably
Speaker 1: not going to believe in six months a year's time.
Speaker 1: You know, as there's models of the mind get better
Speaker 1: and better, we hope more and more accurate. We'll make
Speaker 1: errors along the way, and we just must get better
Speaker 1: at dealing with the uncertainties of evidence. People like certainty.
Speaker 1: They like to know that you know, X and Y
Speaker 1: is going to happen. It's not like that in psychology.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a place where ambiguity thrives, and it's
Speaker 1: only really over time, when you've got enough evidence collected
Speaker 1: on certain conditions, you can make certain conclusions. But it
Speaker 1: will take some time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I don't even know if there's anything you
Speaker 2: would find evidence wise that would convince the believers.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, I mean that's be true that, as
Speaker 1: we said, the same might be true the skeptics. No
Speaker 1: matter what evidence you give them, sometimes they change, you know.
Speaker 1: We like our entrenched positions, and it probably you know,
Speaker 1: whenever I was doing that stuff in public stuff, I
Speaker 1: was always seeing it like a kind of curve where
Speaker 1: you have the extreme believers one in, extreme skeptics the other.
Speaker 1: You're probably not going to change their minds, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people in the middle who don't haven't
Speaker 1: made up their minds, and they're the people that you're
Speaker 1: trying to inform as accurately as you can. But it
Speaker 1: will take time. I mean this, you know, JP Ryan
Speaker 1: was what nineteen thirties, nineteen forties. We're also one hundred
Speaker 1: years on from that. We're still having the same debates,
Speaker 1: but will slowly get there. As you will rule psychology.
Speaker 2: We will. And I appreciate your your very rigorous research.
Speaker 2: I really liked your paper Think of a Card. I
Speaker 2: like the title A retrospective analysis. The subtitles a little
Speaker 2: more boring, but a retrospective analysis of a classic ESP
Speaker 2: experiment from twenty twenty one you found. The results do
Speaker 2: not provide evidence for psychic functioning, but they do suggest
Speaker 2: and this is I want to know that data that
Speaker 2: the public's preference for particular playing cards has remained fairly stable.
Speaker 2: So I always hear from my film Magicins females like
Speaker 2: Queen of Hearts and men love Ace of Speeds. Is
Speaker 2: that still true?
Speaker 1: I don't always did a gender split there, But what
Speaker 1: we were showing there was that somebody did a very
Speaker 1: similar thing in the nineteen I think it was twenties.
Speaker 1: I think Side of Psychic Research did it where they
Speaker 1: asked lots of people to name a playing cards. We
Speaker 1: had that data, and then we also had the data
Speaker 1: for much more recent studies, and it turns out pretty
Speaker 1: much the same. So preferences, population, stereotypes, if you like,
Speaker 1: for playing cards haven't changed over that time. That the
Speaker 1: problem it gives magicians is you are right that when
Speaker 1: you say name a card, people tend to say Queen
Speaker 1: a Heart, says the Spades. But the issue is that
Speaker 1: I think people also know they're commonly called cards, and
Speaker 1: so there's almost no point in predicting them or using
Speaker 1: them in a trick. I mean, you want to get
Speaker 1: things impressive. You want to say, name a card, but
Speaker 1: don't make it obvious. One way Spades or Queen of Hearts.
Speaker 1: At least you've taken out that avenue because as you
Speaker 1: know good magic, you know there's lots of different methods,
Speaker 1: and to get a really good effect, you need to
Speaker 1: take out all of those methods. And we're mentalism oh
Speaker 1: a bit. Everyone says that is one of those those
Speaker 1: kind of methods.
Speaker 2: So this is I mean, you really are consistently finding
Speaker 2: in lots of different Methodologi's lots of different ways. Really
Speaker 2: is not a psychic effect, but you do find some
Speaker 2: things that I still think are extraordinarily interesting, maybe just interesting.
Speaker 2: And that's that people who do believe in supernatural phenomenon
Speaker 2: tend to have certain personality characteristics or certain psychological attributes.
Speaker 2: I love that you did a whole review of this.
Speaker 2: Can you tell you you did extensive You looked at intelligence,
Speaker 2: you know, like cognitive ability, critical thinking, belief in psychic ability.
Speaker 2: Who are what is the type of person? Can you
Speaker 2: just outline the type of person who really kind of
Speaker 2: sees the supernatural everywhere they look.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not just myself. Lots of people looked at
Speaker 1: that literature and continue to look at it. The cognitive
Speaker 1: stuff certainly in terms of if you want to use
Speaker 1: the word intelligence r i Q doesn't tend to bear out.
Speaker 1: What tends to be more accurate is it's people who
Speaker 1: are high on hypnotic susceptibility, so they make good hypnosis subjects.
Speaker 1: They're high on imagination, they're intuitive thinkers. They score high
Speaker 1: on what's called openness, which is sort of a measure
Speaker 1: of creativity. That's what tends to cluster around belief in
Speaker 1: the paranormal. And that kind of makes sense because to
Speaker 1: make the paranormal attribution, you have to be quite open
Speaker 1: to something which isn't really sort of widely believed in
Speaker 1: Western society at least. And second, you're often making a
Speaker 1: connection between two events. So if you have a dream
Speaker 1: and then the following day something happens, you have to
Speaker 1: see some kind of correspondence between that dream and what happened.
Speaker 1: And the more creative you are, the better ability you
Speaker 1: have to see those correspondences. So you might in your
Speaker 1: dream see and make something up a ship coming in
Speaker 1: to port, and the next day a friend offers you
Speaker 1: a new job. Well, if you're not very creative, you go,
Speaker 1: there's nothing like a ship coming into port and a
Speaker 1: new job. And then if you are creative, you go, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: but a ship coming in that represents opportunity in my
Speaker 1: dream world. And look I was off this job at
Speaker 1: Radical Change and so on. So it is it makes
Speaker 1: sense that people who have these sorts of experiences and
Speaker 1: they tend to then underpin belief, have those sorts of
Speaker 1: kind of ways of seeing the world. But it's not
Speaker 1: very related to quotes, intelligence or education levels. It goes
Speaker 1: across gender, goes across age, goes across time. I mean,
Speaker 1: belief in ESP you go back to Ryan's day, is
Speaker 1: not far off of what it is now. So in
Speaker 1: the UK we hit about fifty five percent consistently belief
Speaker 1: in the ESP, about forty percent for ghosts. We like
Speaker 1: our ghosts over here, and those figures haven't changed much
Speaker 1: while I was looking at it for about decade.
Speaker 2: There's a new study I don't know if you saw
Speaker 2: a really restart off the press study connected by Paul
Speaker 2: Silver and as colleagues on who seems to enjoy magic, Yes,
Speaker 2: and they found two very different kinds of people. You know,
Speaker 2: you one hand, you get the skeptical rational folk is
Speaker 2: a subclass, and then you ask on the other hand,
Speaker 2: you get what you're describing the more superstitious paranormal folk.
Speaker 2: But they both seem to equally love it, but for
Speaker 2: different reasons. Probably.
Speaker 1: I think that's true of performing, isn't it. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know that when you do a magic trick, there
Speaker 1: are some people that if you paid the money, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to know what the solution is. They enjoy
Speaker 1: that magical experience, and other people would pay you for
Speaker 1: the solution and so and of course there's a magician.
Speaker 1: You have to appeal to both sets. And I think
Speaker 1: magicians themselves tend to fall into the latter class. They
Speaker 1: tend to be about methods, how things are done, that
Speaker 1: was clever and so on, and I think they forget
Speaker 1: that most people are in the former They just want
Speaker 1: to have this wonderful, pleasant, entertaining experience. And so there's
Speaker 1: a bit of a mismatch sometimes between audience and performer.
Speaker 1: And the other problem I think from a can I
Speaker 1: solve it point of view is the whole point of
Speaker 1: magic is you can't you know, to use that phrase,
Speaker 1: it gives you a stone in your shoe. You go
Speaker 1: around thinking well, it can't be that. It can't be that.
Speaker 1: And it's very clever because it's not only an individual
Speaker 1: can't solve it. If you're doing close up magic at
Speaker 1: a table and you walk away, you know everyone's going
Speaker 1: to be talking about that trick as a group. They
Speaker 1: can't solve it otherwise, you know, otherwise it's a bad trick.
Speaker 1: So it's very interesting from a problem solving point of view.
Speaker 1: But for me, the challenge, and this goes right back
Speaker 1: to how twin friends and influence people, is how do
Speaker 1: you do magic and remain likable? I mean, the yeah,
Speaker 1: the contract is, you know, there's this trick I'm doing
Speaker 1: and people go right, well, what's the secret and you say,
Speaker 1: I can't tell you, and they're supposed to like you
Speaker 1: for that. I mean, we don't like people that don't
Speaker 1: tell us secrets. I cannot perform for my friends. I
Speaker 1: mean I find it simply impossible because they're just going
Speaker 1: to go, well, how's that done? That? As a friend,
Speaker 1: I would normally tell them anything like that, and you
Speaker 1: still have to go, oh, I can't tell you. So
Speaker 1: I think that's the challenge for magicians is actually to
Speaker 1: remain likable what'st doing this weird activity of essentially lying
Speaker 1: to people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think being likable is like half the battle
Speaker 2: of being a good magician, especially if you do walk around,
Speaker 2: you know, and getting people receptive to even just I think.
Speaker 1: It's more more than half the battle. Getting people into
Speaker 1: that state of mind where they don't care in a
Speaker 1: good way. How the trick is done is absolutely key
Speaker 1: to it. You know, magicians are entertainers. Well, and it's
Speaker 1: it's difficult.
Speaker 2: I don't know, what are your thoughts. What do you
Speaker 2: think of mentalism? I'm obsessed. I love mentalism and I
Speaker 2: and just personally it suits me and I finally gets
Speaker 2: a better reaction than the car tracks. But I just
Speaker 2: find that nothing beats the reaction of like, hey, can
Speaker 2: I guess your favorite movie?
Speaker 1: Why do you think that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about that, let's nerd out about that.
Speaker 2: I there's some people I've asked people why. They're like,
Speaker 2: this is something different. They're like, this is something else
Speaker 2: that you know, like, yeah, I liked all those other
Speaker 2: card tricks you did, and I like, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: you made a card go through a whole you know case.
Speaker 2: You know, that's nice. Okay, But like if you, I
Speaker 2: guess someone's first crush. People feel like that's something different.
Speaker 2: It's not magic anymore. It's just pure mind reading, and
Speaker 2: it takes it to a different realm. Even though I'm
Speaker 2: I'm honest, I'm not. I don't say like, oh, I'm psychic,
Speaker 2: you know dot, I don't say I'm psychic, but it
Speaker 2: almost Sometimes when I say that, some people who are
Speaker 2: really into that stuff will be like, well, that's what
Speaker 2: a psychic would say, or that's what a magician would say,
Speaker 2: who is actually psychic. I don't know why that is
Speaker 2: what I would say, but anyway, so there's some there's
Speaker 2: something else going on with mentalism in terms of how
Speaker 2: it hits people a personal, like a deep personal, because
Speaker 2: you're like going into their minds apparently, and that's different
Speaker 2: than the separation you have from magic.
Speaker 1: I think that's right. I think it's a few things.
Speaker 1: One is you're right, it's normally personal to them. But
Speaker 1: also I think it's more plausible. I mean, if you're
Speaker 1: gonna put a coin your hand to make it disappear,
Speaker 1: No one actually believes that. Maybe at some point in
Speaker 1: history they did, but they don't now. Mentalism, Oh, the
Speaker 1: idea that somebody could read my mind. What do you
Speaker 1: believe in esp you believe that if it's a psychological illusion, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at your body language. Well, we know that
Speaker 1: we give off tells in body language. We read each
Speaker 1: other's body language all the time. Maybe this person is
Speaker 1: just super good at it. So in a sense, it
Speaker 1: removes exactly what I was talking about before, which is
Speaker 1: the stone in the shoe, that that they have got
Speaker 1: an explanation, so they don't look for any other explanation,
Speaker 1: and so I think that's part of the appeal. I
Speaker 1: don't think it's the same experience as seeing physical magic.
Speaker 1: I think it's a different experience because you're seeing something
Speaker 1: remarkable rather than something impossible. You have got working hypotheses
Speaker 1: in your head. That may not be what the performer
Speaker 1: is doing, of course, but still it feels like to me,
Speaker 1: it's closer if you went to the circus. I'm going
Speaker 1: to the circus in two days. If I go to
Speaker 1: the circus and there's flying trapeze people and they do
Speaker 1: a triple, I go, oh, my goodness. I know you've
Speaker 1: dedicated your life to that, and I believe that is
Speaker 1: a genuine display of physical skill. And I go, oh,
Speaker 1: my goodness, incredible. If I found out actually just on
Speaker 1: a rig and they're being held up by wires, it's
Speaker 1: not really a triple, I would be devastated. Yes, that's
Speaker 1: not the experience I'm paying for. And I think mentally
Speaker 1: kind of occupies that space. It's like I'm seeing something remarkable.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's this, maybe it's that. But it's very different
Speaker 1: to magic, which we know is a trick. I think
Speaker 1: that's why, in part, why people like it. So it's
Speaker 1: it's a very powerful tool. It's been around for a
Speaker 1: long time in one form or another, and it always
Speaker 1: piggybacks on public belief. You know when when public did
Speaker 1: believe in spirits and seances, well the mentalists were doing that,
Speaker 1: and it's the esp they were doing that. Now it's
Speaker 1: all about body language. Well they're doing that. So it
Speaker 1: has an interesting kind of evolution.
Speaker 2: I think. Yeah, but it's very cultural irrelevant right now
Speaker 2: with the telepathy deeps, the the topic deeps in popularity,
Speaker 2: I feel like I feel like mentalism is like cool again,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like it's bad, we're back.
Speaker 1: Maybe, And also depend on performance. I mean, over here
Speaker 1: we have Darren Brown that that style of magic was
Speaker 1: not particularly popular until Darren came along. He's an astonishing performer,
Speaker 1: and suddenly you see everybody doing all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: You know. Oh yeah, well yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Of course, Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean he's first special if you look
Speaker 1: back to the very first one really filmed at the university, yea, yeah,
Speaker 1: he does a a stunt demonstration be twins. I'm there,
Speaker 1: and then I helped out with a couple of the
Speaker 1: TV programs and stuff, and he's astonishing. I actually thought
Speaker 1: invented a mind reading item, and I'm not I don't
Speaker 1: do mentalism, but I showed it to him and it
Speaker 1: was involved in book. He took it off me, performed
Speaker 1: it himself in two seconds and fooled me with my
Speaker 1: own creation. I mean, he's he's really really good. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great.
Speaker 2: He's so intelligent, you know as well. Yeah, that's so cool.
Speaker 2: When I used to teach cognitive psychology and n y U,
Speaker 2: I would show video of his stuff, and that was
Speaker 2: way back when I didn't even know anything about how
Speaker 2: he actually did stuff. So he actually foroled me. He
Speaker 2: actually fooled me in a sense, like I used an
Speaker 2: example of like how we can really influence people's minds
Speaker 2: by articulously, you know, like putting things in the environment.
Speaker 2: You know, you know what I'm saying. But so anyway,
Speaker 2: but once you've got.
Speaker 1: That explanation, so I've you and I have been to
Speaker 1: a lot of magic conventions. Yeah, there's very big one
Speaker 1: coming up next week in this country at Blackpool. I
Speaker 1: will see the air back, but I will see stuff there.
Speaker 1: I'm not going this year, but when I normally go,
Speaker 1: I will see stuff that blows me away. I've got
Speaker 1: no idea, But in magic forties, I've got no idea
Speaker 1: how it's done. When I go and see psychics work,
Speaker 1: and I've sat in on some genuine seances, it's awful.
Speaker 1: The trickery is awful. And the reason is it doesn't
Speaker 1: need to be any better because no one's looking for
Speaker 1: a trick to commune with the spirits, true, and so
Speaker 1: you don't They don't need to be good magicians or
Speaker 1: good tricksters. It's the magicians that need to be because
Speaker 1: everyone knows they're watching a magic trick. So it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of interesting that the power of that frame of saying,
Speaker 1: actually this is genuine or this is body language or
Speaker 1: whatever is. It prevents people going any deeper where magicians
Speaker 1: don't have that frame. They're saying it's a trick and
Speaker 1: everyone's going good. This is a challenge. I'll try and
Speaker 1: work the outlet.
Speaker 2: What a terrific point. You know. People are I mean
Speaker 2: seanswers what are they called? Psychic psychic sancewers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've done. I've done loads of fake saliances, probably
Speaker 1: a hundred sort of dark room seances. I love doing them. Well.
Speaker 2: The ones that professionally, you know do they have it
Speaker 2: easier because their audience is coming to them with just
Speaker 2: you know, no question, this is true, right, you know,
Speaker 2: that's far better than having to perform in a drunk
Speaker 2: you know bar with the skeptical you know girl who's
Speaker 2: like okay, well I'm going to change my mind now
Speaker 2: and trying to fool you totally.
Speaker 1: And you go along to a spiritualist church or a
Speaker 1: psychic reading, you know whatever. People are there to be
Speaker 1: receptive when you say, you know what they're making, they're
Speaker 1: doing all the work for you. Go along for a
Speaker 1: palm reading or crystal ball really whatever it is. They
Speaker 1: are there to do that work for you. Magicians will
Speaker 1: never get away with that stuff because they're tending it
Speaker 1: in it and it can be the same people. The
Speaker 1: same people at one minute will be believing of a
Speaker 1: palm reading will be very skeptical of magicians trying to
Speaker 1: solve the trick the next because they've switched. They've switched frames.
Speaker 2: That is so funny and interesting about humans, just that fact. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so you don't think we can commune with the dead.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen convincing evidence of that. I've seen convincing
Speaker 1: evidence of a lack of communicating with the dead. We've
Speaker 1: done a lot of fake seances that goes back as
Speaker 1: a magician actor in this country called Andy Nan, who
Speaker 1: works with Darren a lot actually, and some of Andy's
Speaker 1: first shows with me doing these fake seances when we
Speaker 1: were both very very young performers, and it was incredible.
Speaker 1: We have these sort of loominous objects moving around in
Speaker 1: the dark and so on, so much fun music, traditional
Speaker 1: Victorian methods. They're very simple, but still for people because
Speaker 1: when you're in the darkness, you're very vulnerable. You can't
Speaker 1: tell how far away objects are or where people are
Speaker 1: and so on. So yeah, I had a lot of
Speaker 1: fun doing that that stuff.
Speaker 2: My my friend Spencer Greenberg did a ward scale study
Speaker 2: about astrologists and and wanted to know do they really
Speaker 2: believe this is true? And he found that an awful lot,
Speaker 2: maybe even the majority. I mean, they really believe in
Speaker 2: what they're not like, it's not like they're they're trying
Speaker 2: to pour fast one over others. But and so I said,
Speaker 2: now do psychics is what I said. He's like, Hey,
Speaker 2: that'll be my next study. But I want to know
Speaker 2: if you have any insight into that, because I do,
Speaker 2: Like I have some friends who are mediums. They're professional mediums,
Speaker 2: and I don't, you know, I don't feel like it's
Speaker 2: my place, Like I get the sense of my talk
Speaker 2: to them. They actually believe they are mediums. They are
Speaker 2: communicating with the dead. So I don't think all mediums are,
Speaker 2: you know, doing the trickery and conscious of their trickery.
Speaker 2: Is there something else going on where like I don't
Speaker 2: know what it is, Like in my head, it just
Speaker 2: seems so obvious that if I'm doing trickery, I know
Speaker 2: I'm doing trickery. I can't imagine. I can't imagine myself
Speaker 2: doing trickery not knowing it. But there seems to be
Speaker 2: a case where a lot of psychics believe their psychics,
Speaker 2: and why do they believe their psychics?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, they're not doing tricks per se. Most of
Speaker 1: those are being doing readings. I think when you get
Speaker 1: to like to say, physical phenomena, the sunes room phenomena,
Speaker 1: then they are tricking people, and they would know about that.
Speaker 1: Most of them are doing readings. So what happens there?
Speaker 1: Somebody sits down, you come up with a reading, and
Speaker 1: the person goes, my goodness, that's incredibly accurate, and you
Speaker 1: could easily see how that gets internalized of oh, I've
Speaker 1: got some kind of gifts. Then, because the feedback you're
Speaker 1: getting so my auntswer used to be up until a
Speaker 1: few months ago, I think the vast majority of them
Speaker 1: believe their own kind of abilities. However, I then met
Speaker 1: a friend of mine who works as a professional psychic,
Speaker 1: and he said, you're kidding me. He said, I go
Speaker 1: out every day as all my colleagues do. We say
Speaker 1: the same thing to people. All the readings are the same,
Speaker 1: he said, I might a minor variation in but people
Speaker 1: are endorsing the same reading night after night. There's no
Speaker 1: way we're doing that and not realizing that most of
Speaker 1: it is blowney. So he flipped me the other way.
Speaker 1: He said, what keeps you going are the amazing hits?
Speaker 1: He said, sometimes you go into a weird space and
Speaker 1: you get hit, and that's what convinces you. But most
Speaker 1: of the time, he said, you know what, We're all
Speaker 1: just saying the same thing and getting the same feedback.
Speaker 2: So I don't know.
Speaker 1: I then flip back a little bit.
Speaker 2: Why this is fastening insights? So thank you? Why are
Speaker 2: they ethically okay with that?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean mentalists, you asked the same question to them.
Speaker 1: You know that after they don't say to people this
Speaker 1: is a trick. They'll say I'm doing X, Y and
Speaker 1: Z and try and keep them away from the trick work.
Speaker 2: But psychics are an entertainers.
Speaker 1: Well, that's the greater good argument. So the argument is
Speaker 1: for some greater Well, you could say within an entertainment context,
Speaker 1: it's all fine, and psychics would probably say the same.
Speaker 1: A lot of it is within entertainment, or I suspect
Speaker 1: most of them will do a greater good argument, which
Speaker 1: is that it's hard in this country to get access
Speaker 1: to a therapist. Most people can't afford that it's not
Speaker 1: on the national health system. Over here, they give somebody
Speaker 1: attention for twenty minutes and it helps that person. And
Speaker 1: the evidence is that I think they're right that most
Speaker 1: people enjoy going to psychics and find it helpful. When
Speaker 1: you do those kind of studies, that's probably ethically where
Speaker 1: they go, is my guess.
Speaker 2: I see. So you really don't think there's any evidence
Speaker 2: at all for the idea that psychic ability is an
Speaker 2: individual differences variable, that there really are some people on
Speaker 2: this planet that have this gift.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it, no, wady Oviously, it's loads of evidence.
Speaker 1: You look at upstairs. I've got all the parapsychology journals.
Speaker 1: They're full of evidence. The question is is it convincing.
Speaker 1: I don't find it particularly convincing, but who knows. Maybe
Speaker 1: that will change in the future. There's certainly an argument
Speaker 1: there for carrying out those studies. If you're getting into
Speaker 1: psychically gifted people, you know, those that can sit down
Speaker 1: and instantly do this stuff, and it's a very large
Speaker 1: effect size, Well that's very easy to test, and I
Speaker 1: find those tests of the gifted psychics completely unconvincing. So
Speaker 1: most of the lab evidence is it's like a psychologic experiment.
Speaker 1: You test two hundred people. You put all their results together,
Speaker 1: it's slightly better than chance. That's very different to you know,
Speaker 1: the psychic that goes. I can turn this thing on,
Speaker 1: tell you all about future dead, easy to test, and
Speaker 1: normally completely unconvincing the results of those tests.
Speaker 2: It's all sad, like I want there to be I
Speaker 2: want this to exist. Good thing would be interesting. Well
Speaker 2: what do you do you.
Speaker 1: Though, I mean it would it would change some people
Speaker 1: got different worldviews. I mean, if you believe in life
Speaker 1: after death. I guess that's kind of comforting. This is
Speaker 1: what lies about the future, is that it's uncertain. If
Speaker 1: I knew what the future held for you and it was,
Speaker 1: you know, awful, and I told you that and you
Speaker 1: knew I was correct, I'm not certain that's an uplifting
Speaker 1: that's true.
Speaker 2: I think that there is an individual differences variable that's
Speaker 2: relevant here, even though it's not psychic ability. And that
Speaker 2: was the major topic of my pH D, wasn't plsit learning.
Speaker 2: I think there are some people who really do, like
Speaker 2: I was curious, Like IQ tests have been studied, but
Speaker 2: they're in an implicit intelligence that are some people generally
Speaker 2: better at unconscious pattern recognition and or non conscious patterned recognition.
Speaker 2: How does that correlate with IQ? So that was my
Speaker 2: cognition paper, was showing a zero correlation between the two. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I was like the first to really adopt those
Speaker 2: implicit learning tasks and the cognitive science literature for individual differences.
Speaker 2: So that was my dissertation.
Speaker 1: So you tell me what's an implicit learning task.
Speaker 2: One one would be like the zero reaction time task
Speaker 2: where you have people just press a key corresponding to
Speaker 2: a letter as fast as they can, and we look
Speaker 2: at reaction times and we see that some people over
Speaker 2: time without any understanding or recognition of it because you
Speaker 2: need you debrief them at the end. You're like, do
Speaker 2: you think you learned anything from this boring ass task?
Speaker 2: And they're like no, And some of them actually were
Speaker 2: much quicker at learning the reoccurring like very complex pattern
Speaker 2: And that's one example. Another thing would be like Arthur
Speaker 2: Weber's artificial grammar eLearning task, where some people, after being
Speaker 2: exposed to lots of different a fake grammar, actually learned
Speaker 2: the principles better statistical warning. You know, it's how other
Speaker 2: people would in the order to describe.
Speaker 1: It years ago. I don't if this council night. It's
Speaker 1: not my field. I did a ESP thing with an
Speaker 1: entire class where I had deck of cards I stacked
Speaker 1: red red black, red, red black, red, red black, and
Speaker 1: as people try to guess it, and they didn't pick
Speaker 1: up on the pattern consciously, but they slowly got better
Speaker 1: as a group. Yes, and then slowly thought that And
Speaker 1: you can see in which differences in there. We never
Speaker 1: looked at it, but they slowly thought there was ESP
Speaker 1: emerging because on different groups of trials they were slowly
Speaker 1: getting better. So I didn't that would count as the
Speaker 1: same thing.
Speaker 2: It would, it would, it really would. That could have
Speaker 2: been another task that, you know, we added to our battery.
Speaker 2: So at the general level, yeah, people show their significant
Speaker 2: effects of pussering and and there are individual differences. Both
Speaker 2: are true at the same time. So I am just
Speaker 2: thinking that I really do think there are some people
Speaker 2: who are more intuitive whatever, you know, Like I think
Speaker 2: it's scientifically, scientifically that means something that's not like a
Speaker 2: woo woo statement. And and I don't think it's just
Speaker 2: the high intelligence people. This is something I wanted to
Speaker 2: point out, you know. It's like, so I have I
Speaker 2: think called the dual process theory of intelligence. But so
Speaker 2: I think that with psychics with you know, a lot
Speaker 2: of these mediums that I meet. I have a friend
Speaker 2: who's a medium, for instance, and I find her the
Speaker 2: most like she's like emotionally open in an incredible way.
Speaker 2: She is just so open. And we found a correlation
Speaker 2: between and PUSS learning and openness to experience the personality.
Speaker 1: Trait, which is the one I was talking about before
Speaker 1: with stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, but but but you meet someone with three forced
Speaker 2: inner deviations that mean an openness to experience, and it
Speaker 2: is a different kind of person yes, And and I'm
Speaker 2: not saying this is magical, but I'm saying there is
Speaker 2: something there that I think, you know, we could do
Speaker 2: well to appreciate more as an individual differences variable. And
Speaker 2: it's a talent, it's a skill even though it doesn't
Speaker 2: we don't necessarily have to go to their psychic level.
Speaker 2: But they're picking up on lots of nuances.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's right. But my understanding is you'd
Speaker 1: only have those intuitive thoughts and trust them when you've
Speaker 1: got a lot of experience with whatever it is that
Speaker 1: you're you're doing. Ye, And so you know, I've given
Speaker 1: talks on psychology. I give a lot of public talks,
Speaker 1: and in fact, there's one particular talk on luck I've
Speaker 1: given hundreds of times. During that talk, often I'll get
Speaker 1: an intuitive feeling about that audience that I need to
Speaker 1: do this or there's going to be a problem coming up,
Speaker 1: and it's normally always right. Well, that's because I've given
Speaker 1: the talk so many times, you know. I often say
Speaker 1: when I teach public speaking, silence is odd in a
Speaker 1: group because board silence sounds different to interested silence, and
Speaker 1: if you've given a lot of talks, you can hear
Speaker 1: the difference. There's a very subtle difference in board silence
Speaker 1: and interesting. So intuitively I'll go, I have to make
Speaker 1: this more interesting now because I can hear the group
Speaker 1: of board or actually I can take them down that
Speaker 1: root because I can hear that they're interesting. I'm not
Speaker 1: thinking about that. I'm just intuitively doing it. So yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I think intuition is really important. I think, perhaps, well,
Speaker 1: at this half my ideas for studies and books and
Speaker 1: so on come to me in dreams. I often wake
Speaker 1: up and write down dreams because that's that's where they
Speaker 1: manifest themselves, solutions to problems and solved, so we shouldn't
Speaker 1: throw the baby out with the bath water.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, I agree. Are you Are you familiar
Speaker 2: with Diane Pale's research?
Speaker 1: No, I'm not. No.
Speaker 2: Diane Hennessy Pale she studies the science of esp and
Speaker 2: she's one of the ones who was featured on the
Speaker 2: Telepathy Teeps podcast. I just had her on my podcast,
Speaker 2: so I can I can send you my chat with
Speaker 2: her as well. She seems to be pretty we I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess we both describe ourselves as open skeptics, you know,
Speaker 2: which I think is probably the right way to be.
Speaker 2: And well, obviously I think it's the right way to
Speaker 2: be if that's where I am. But yeah, but doctor Powell,
Speaker 2: she really believes, you know, there's something here. But when
Speaker 2: we talked about this, picking up the nuance and stuff,
Speaker 2: it's interesting because a lot of these auto there's something
Speaker 2: special here with autistic savants that I think is worth
Speaker 2: further investigation because they're completely nonverbal. I think there in
Speaker 2: plicit learning ability is I did some research at Cambridge,
Speaker 2: University of Cambridge on this topic and I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 2: gonna collaborate with UH with uh Simon Baron Cohen to
Speaker 2: test some of these kids, you know from the telep
Speaker 2: Day tapes, because I think there's something, there's something, there's
Speaker 2: something here. It's really interesting where if you're completely nonverbal,
Speaker 2: if you're completely uh yeah, completely nonverbal, and you really
Speaker 2: hone this incredible ability to just be observant to regularities
Speaker 2: and patterns you're not like in by language so much,
Speaker 2: it can really you can become, like you know, talking
Speaker 2: about ericson ten years of deliberate practice, you could become
Speaker 2: such an expert in something that it can really blow
Speaker 2: people's minds, you know. And you found in the telepty
Speaker 2: tapes that it's usually the mother or the person that
Speaker 2: the child. As soon as you bring in like a stranger,
Speaker 2: they can't read their mind anymore. And yeah, I kept
Speaker 2: bringing that up. I was like, I was like, I
Speaker 2: want to double cook on that, because there's something about that,
Speaker 2: Like if I spend enough time with anyone, you start
Speaker 2: to find like like couples start to complete each other's sentences.
Speaker 2: They don't call themselves psychics, right, They start to know
Speaker 2: each other so well. So I think there's something going
Speaker 2: on there where like these kids get to know their
Speaker 2: moms so well.
Speaker 1: It's interesting I mean, I don't know that work. The
Speaker 1: stuff I do know, which is about psychology of lying,
Speaker 1: is actually the opposite, which is that when people know
Speaker 1: each other well, they are less able to detect lies
Speaker 1: in their partner's long term friends. But the reason for
Speaker 1: that is they exhibit what's called a truth bias, which
Speaker 1: is they don't want to believe their partners and friends
Speaker 1: are lying, so they always say truth on it. So
Speaker 1: is slightly different, but yeah, I guess that could be true.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting, exciting idea, and yeah, look into it,
Speaker 1: go for it. I mean, that gets full circle. That
Speaker 1: feels like a meaningful thing to do one way or another.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Just to conclude this interview with success
Speaker 2: in life, a big.
Speaker 1: We haven't touched on at all after saying we would
Speaker 1: do at the.
Speaker 2: Beginning, Yeah, I'm happy to do it now for a
Speaker 2: little bit, a couple of minutes, because I am really
Speaker 2: fascinated with a thread that runs through multiple of your books,
Speaker 2: and that's from positive thinking to positive action. I think
Speaker 2: that summarizes a lot of the thread that runs, like
Speaker 2: just act already, you know, and can you kind of
Speaker 2: explain to me the differencely parsive thinking positive acting And
Speaker 2: are you kind of yeah, why do you think action
Speaker 2: is so important for success in life?
Speaker 1: I just think as humans we learn by doing stuff.
Speaker 1: There's only so many simulations you can run in your head.
Speaker 1: So for me, if I'm inventing a magic trick, I
Speaker 1: can think of something I think that will work and
Speaker 1: much small change here, or if I'm doing one of
Speaker 1: the quackology videos. But you know what, nothing beats getting
Speaker 1: out a deck of cars or whatever it is and
Speaker 1: doing it for a real person and you suddenly find
Speaker 1: out that thing that you thought would fly they detect
Speaker 1: in two seconds, and something else that you thought would
Speaker 1: be awful actually turns out to be brilliant. We learn
Speaker 1: by doing. And if you look at this on the
Speaker 1: most successful people, they do they don't just talk about it.
Speaker 1: Many many, many, many many years ago, I sat up
Speaker 1: in a tree house with a good friend of mine,
Speaker 1: Adrian Owen, now a very famous European scientist. I know,
Speaker 1: I know Adrian, and I go back to ucl We
Speaker 1: were undergraduates together and we shared a flat together. We
Speaker 1: did the stuff in Covent Garden was jointed with.
Speaker 2: Adrian don wonderful, wonderful.
Speaker 1: So we sat there and We sat up in this
Speaker 1: treehouse on our first holiday together in the south of
Speaker 1: England and we're talking about various plans and we made
Speaker 1: a pact, which is that if we mentioned an idea
Speaker 1: three times, we had to do it, and that we
Speaker 1: both of us have stayed with that throughout our lives.
Speaker 1: It's been thirty something years now that if you say
Speaker 1: something three times, you have to do it instead of
Speaker 1: just talking about it. And it's a very good formula
Speaker 1: for success because you find out this thing's a terrible
Speaker 1: idea or a good idea or whatever, but you get
Speaker 1: out there and when you get out there, you attract
Speaker 1: other people because they find out what you're doing other
Speaker 1: like minded people or help you or whatever. So I'm
Speaker 1: a huge fan of doing where a lot of psychology
Speaker 1: self help is about thinking and thinking differently where I think,
Speaker 1: you know what, just get on and do it. The
Speaker 1: worst that happened is you'll fail and you'll learn something,
Speaker 1: you know. I did a show of the Edber Fringe
Speaker 1: here last year in August, and normally do magic shows. Well,
Speaker 1: the first one wasn't my best show, to put it mildly,
Speaker 1: but you have to do ten in a row and
Speaker 1: by the time you hit show ten, it was pretty
Speaker 1: tight and I could sat at home imagining this wonderful
Speaker 1: show and how funny and hilarious it was going to be.
Speaker 1: Doesn't matter until you're out there doing it. That's what
Speaker 1: you learn.
Speaker 2: Such a deep truth and you know that that is
Speaker 2: the thread that runs through so much of your discussions
Speaker 2: about happiness. And and I'm a super interested integrating your
Speaker 2: work with Darren Brown's work on happiness. You know, the
Speaker 2: psychology of happiness, Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and it's great and I think, I mean,
Speaker 1: happiness is slightly different to success, but the two of
Speaker 1: them are heavily related. Slightly different, but I just think
Speaker 1: we're very good at, you know, whatever it is. So
Speaker 1: I always say to my students, you know, there'll be
Speaker 1: some passion you've got in life, and you can you
Speaker 1: can pursue psychology if you want, but you'll be far
Speaker 1: more successful if you pursue that passion. And pursue means
Speaker 1: get out there and do it, don't just think about
Speaker 1: it or talk about it or whatever. And that was
Speaker 1: great about psychology is you often combine those two. If
Speaker 1: you love horse riding, where you can do the psychology
Speaker 1: of horse riding if you love running, you do the
Speaker 1: psychology of running, and you'll be the only person in
Speaker 1: the world that has those Probably that those two things combined,
Speaker 1: therefore you become an expert and you spend longer doing
Speaker 1: it than anyone else. I spent all my life looking
Speaker 1: psychology and magic. It doesn't feel like work. I love
Speaker 1: doing it. That idea of doing that psychology of magic
Speaker 1: stuff actually comes from Max Maven. I went to the
Speaker 1: Magic Castle when I was about eighteen nineteen and I
Speaker 1: said to Max, I'm thinking of being a professional magician.
Speaker 1: He said, what's your other option? I said, a psychologist,
Speaker 1: and he said, combine them. You'll become one of the
Speaker 1: very few people looking in at psychology of magic. Boy,
Speaker 1: that was great advice.
Speaker 2: You're giving me chills. You're giving me a chill. You're
Speaker 2: a very inspirational figure to me. You really are. I
Speaker 2: feel the same way. I feel like there's so many
Speaker 2: mentalists out specifically mentalism. There's so many mentalists out there
Speaker 2: who say they do psychology, but the lane of psychologist,
Speaker 2: like legit psychologists who do mentalism, I feel like, is
Speaker 2: much smaller, and so for me that's exciting. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of there's a lot of potential there
Speaker 2: to use mentalism to like unlock people's potential or like
Speaker 2: show people that like you know, there there's you know,
Speaker 2: the reach of their minds. Jb Ryan would say.
Speaker 1: Well, probably every psychology paper is potentially a good presentation
Speaker 1: for a piece of mentalism, but you have to know
Speaker 1: that stuff. But it goes beyond you know, magic. I
Speaker 1: think you know, every single undergraduate will have some passion
Speaker 1: and often it's not psychology, it's something outside of that,
Speaker 1: and their eyes light up and they starts talking in
Speaker 1: a really energetic way when they're talking about that. And
Speaker 1: tapping that energy and bringing it into psychology, you know,
Speaker 1: is one way and making it meaningful and probably means
Speaker 1: a far more successful career.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Working on a new for In show which will be
Speaker 1: out in August for magicians listening. I'll be over at
Speaker 1: FISM in July in Italy, which is a sort of
Speaker 1: week long celebration of magic, and also doing some other
Speaker 1: work which will be published very very soon. I've just
Speaker 1: seen that the paper before it goes into the journal,
Speaker 1: looking at OPT collusions, particularly ambiguous OPT collusions to kind
Speaker 1: of duck rabbit things. There's a new take on those.
Speaker 1: So yes, still doing all this stuff after all these years.
Speaker 1: But thank you for your kind comments throughout this.
Speaker 2: It's very kind, of course I mean them. And I
Speaker 2: love your videos on YouTube, so everyone check out Richard's
Speaker 2: Escape from Prison. Check out Richard's Perception. You like playing
Speaker 2: a manipulating perception by putting things closer and farther away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all on the quacology channel and we did
Speaker 1: that when. Yeah, and the sort of infancy a YouTube
Speaker 1: actually and now I meet people in their sort of
Speaker 1: mid twenties and going I watched it as a kid
Speaker 1: makes me feel terribly old, but delighted that since ring anyone.
Speaker 2: Well, anyway, thank you so much, Richard, thank you for
Speaker 2: your time today, Thanks for going to be on the podcast.
Speaker 2: And now I guess I'll catch you on the Secret
Speaker 2: Magic Facebook groups.
Speaker 1: Yeah, please please do it lovely to chat to you.
Speaker 1: Thank you