March 3, 2015 • 54 mins
Even though almost half of Americans believe in it, ESP usually is treated as a load of bull by skeptics. But some respected researchers have dared to apply the scientific method to investigate ESP and a few have found some surprising results.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there. I
didn't even have to look why, I just knew, yes,
(00:22):
and dudes and do debts. We are in our new studio. Yeah,
can you tell? Does its sound different? It's the very
first one and um it's tiny. Wait what do you mean?
It's the very first one, very very first podcast we
recorded in here. Yeah, I was gonna say, I said tiny,
but it's not tiny. It's cozy. But it is our
(00:44):
all ours, Yeah, how ours. Everybody else at house Stuff
Works doesn't really know that yet, but they will. Uh yeah,
because when we actually have butt detection and when someone
sits down these seats that aren't LSD to get a
shock and plus an alarm goes off at our desks,
what's called d M R T M. I how are you, sir?
(01:05):
I'm pretty good. I feel like this is fancy. This
is our first real like studio. That's not true, not no,
I'm trying to remember the last one was no. But
it's not a utility closet. It's not a lactation room.
It's not Yeah, it's not a murder room. It's not
like an office with like desk for like office furniture. Yeah,
(01:25):
it's a it's a studio that was built out for
the specific purpose of recording podcasts. All we have to
do is put up our Aaron Cooper originals. The artwork,
got a couple of those waiting, and we gotta work
on the lighting in here a little bit. Yeah, Jerius,
it's such gonna hang some china balls for us. Yes,
you keep pushing the china balls. Um so, anyway, enough
(01:47):
about that. We just wanted to say we're super excited
to be in our new office, in our new studio.
It does feel good. Kudos for that intro. I'm not
gonna say that. I knew you were going to say that. Yeah,
I was going to say that too. I knew that
you were thinking of saying that. Chuck. Yes, uh ESP.
(02:10):
Do you believe in ESP? No? No, not at all.
What do you think it is? Because surely, I mean
just about anyone could agree that humans have some sort
of ability somehow to make good guesses or to the future,
whatever you want to call it. Do you agree or
(02:30):
do you think it's strictly just us selectively paying attention
to random instances over others. I think it's that. And yeah,
and as we'll talk about, I think it's the just
the nature of coincidence is going to happen because so
many things happen every day, Uh, that something is bound
(02:54):
to seem like something you dreamed about the night before
at some point in your life. Yeah. But the other
millions of dreams you have that, don't I think those
are the ones that are the the tell you know,
do you? I don't know, like I want to. I
spent so many years of my life believing and stuff
(03:14):
like that and wanting to go to to Duke University
to study at their paras psychology department believe. Yeah, and
but you know, believing in ghosts and all this and
just that's how I spent my childhood just reading about
stuff like that voraciously. So Ghostbusters really did a number
on you. Yeah. Yeah. When that came along, I was like,
(03:35):
this was made for me. Um. But as an adult,
it's not so much that I believe in the esp
it's more that I UM, I refused to just utterly
disbelieve in the possibility of it. Okay, you know what
I mean. Yeah, I got you there, because we don't
know everything about everything yet, right, but uh yeah, I'm
(03:58):
in the I'm the other camp. And I'm not even
say the skeptic camp because there's people just plug me
bad name some due to some bad apples. Not all skeptics,
but there are some that are horses asses. Can we
say that? I don't know, we'll find out. Um, All right,
well let's talk about And I thought this was interesting
(04:19):
because I never knew that uh ESP is just a
big collective term for all manner of uh paranormal paranormal phenomena,
which you could also call SI. Yeah, and so dude
named jb Ryan, who will talk about later, he coined
ESP the granddaddy. And then in the forties another guy
coined the term sigh and sigh is the Greek letter
(04:42):
and it's equated with psyche or the soul. And the
reason that the guy chose SI is because he felt
ESP suggested it was something supernatural, and SI, he felt,
suggested that this is a normal part of humanity we
just don't understand and it's it sounds like science, right, Um.
(05:04):
But there are several categories of ESP UM and this
is the one. I never knew the actual definitions for these.
I sort of just threw them all in a bag together.
You have telepathy, and that's when you can you know,
you're over there reading my thoughts. Yes, like Chuck is
really not happy to be in the new studio. That's
not true. He'd rather be at home on the couch.
I'm reading your thoughts right now, and I know that
(05:25):
you like this place. Okay, Well, you're you're a telepath. Uh. Clairvoyance,
which is the ability to see events or things objects
happening somewhere else at the same time. So are you
doing Are you a clairvoyant? I am. I'm seeing your
couch right now, and I'm saying it's not that comfy. Yeah,
so you're not missing that much at the moment. I
(05:45):
know somewhere Jonathan Strickland is waxing his head, bald head.
That's just the logical assumption. Uh. Then we have our
precogs precognition. That's when you see into the future. Retrocogs
retro cognition. You can see into the distant past. That's
there's another um that's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition,
(06:07):
like seeing you know a cave like took took running
around with the dinosaurs like you do, which I guess
never would have happened. Um. But there's another term for retrocognition,
whereas something in the future affects something in the past.
So a decision you make in the future affects your past.
And an example given is that, um, you have a
(06:29):
dream about a dinosaur. Now, let's a spotted dog, and
then the first thing the next morning, you go outside
to water your lawn and the same spotted dog or
a similar spotted dog walks by. The idea isn't that
that was very coincidental or that you had esp and
your dreams, but that you seeing that dog in the
(06:50):
morning affected your dream the night before. So that's another
definition that's emerging for retrocognition. That's getting a lot of
traction because of the stuff we're finding on the quantum scale,
just weirdness like that. All right, Then you have your
mediumship and that's um ms Cleo who can channel dead
spirits forgot about her? And then you have how much
(07:12):
money that woman grossed in the nineties. She made a
lot of though I hope so yeah, I mean, she
was working hard, she had a finite window of opportunity,
and she worked that whole time. She didn't like buy
a sailboat and sail around the world after like a
first million. You know, like she worked. So you're not
in the camp of like she's taking people's money and
(07:33):
taking advantage of people. I see that argument, sure, for sure.
I also see like if people want to spend their
money on that and they get something out of it,
knock yourself out. Uh. And then you have a psychometry,
which is the ability to read info about a person place,
uh by touching the person object. And that's what I
(07:55):
like to call the dead zone. Christopher Walking, he would
place his hands on you and he would see something. Man.
I think we talked about it recently about how that
movie holds up. Still. Yeah, it's such a good movie. Yeah,
it really is good. Chris Walking. There's another one, Chuck
Um called telekinesis, which is like Uri Geller stroking a
(08:17):
spoon and it bending right, like being able to manipulate
matter just using a light touch or your mind, but
there is no spoon. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't that from
matrix Um. All right, So basically, uh, like you said,
J b Ryan is the the granddaddy of all this,
(08:39):
and he actually started studying. I mean, he was a
legitimate scientist, he wasn't some quack. And uh, this was
in the nineteen thirties where he started at Duke University
studying para para psychology basically. And he wasn't the first.
He was one of the first UM laboratory experimenters in
academia to really study SI. Right before him, probably about
(09:02):
forty or so years before him, William James and some
of his pals at the Society for Psychical Research UM
really laid the groundwork for applying the scientific method to
the study of paranormal phenomenon. And they did two things.
They outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like very famously Madame Blevartsky.
(09:25):
But then they also investigated ones like they approached them
typically with like an open mind UM, and if they
found somebody that they just couldn't explain, they would they
studied them. So they were they were studying each one
with an open mind. And the ones they figured out
where frauds they outed as frauds. The ones they figured
out couldn't quite explain, they sought to investigate scientifically rather
(09:49):
than just saying, oh, they're frauds somehow. So that was
the groundwork of the study of sigh. What was Madame
Blevartsky Steel of the Cony Allen She was she actually
she was almost a cult leader. You could argue she
was she um. She created um. Oh man, it's called
(10:09):
like theodism, I think, which is um. It was. It
was almost a cult. It was a huge um movement
in the nineteenth century where like you go to like
a seance and there was a medium there and they
would channel like the spirits of the dead, relatives of
people who were they're holding hands in the circle and
stuff like that. And she gained a lot of power
(10:31):
and wealth and prestige until she was outed as as
a fraud. And I don't remember the the it's theosophy,
that's what it is. Not to see theo is m.
Theo ism has to do with theo Huxtable. Uh did
you see The Source Family, by the way, that documentary. No,
I haven't about the l a cult in the seventies.
I saw the the Icon on Netflix and never clicked
(10:54):
as a good it's really good and it's it's it's awesome. Actually,
I recommend everyone it's one of those where like they
interview a lot of them today and they weren't like,
you know, they didn't commit suicide. Like everyone was like
it was pretty great. Oh yeah, yeah, they're all fine.
They're all just a bunch of hippies. Still. They were
out in l A. Yeah, yeah, right in Hollywood. There
(11:15):
was one and um, there was a documentary I saw
about a cult in Miami and they were like super
fundamentalist Christian but they also were um the basis of
their religion was was formed on pot too. Well that's
what the Source family was. I wonder if they were related. Well,
it was the seventies. Yeah, there were a lot of
(11:37):
pot cults, I bet. But did they turn into like
huge pot dealers. No, I don't think so. This cult
they had a band though, and the called the Source.
You know, I can't remember the name of the band,
but it's pretty interesting to transfer that. It's a really
good documentary. That was just funny to see all these people.
Now they're like it was awesome. Yeah. I had a
(11:58):
lot of sex and smoked a lot of weed. That's
kind of what they These guys didn't seem to have
a lot of sex though they were like real, like um,
compartmentalized gender wise and like male dominance and all that.
But they just smoked a ton of pot all the time,
including their little kids. Well that's not like like four
year old smoke. That's terrible. Yeah. There it was in
(12:18):
the documentaries we're seeing. I don't remember what you had
me up? You lost me there. I lost everybody there
in that documentary. Yeah. Um, all right, So back to
this ESP thing, um, jb Ryan, Yeah, jb Ryan. Well,
basically there's a there's a lot of different outlooks on
what ESP might be. Um, some people think that everyone's
(12:39):
got it, but some people, um, it just pops up
every now and then, um, like I might have a
dream that comes true or whatever. Other people think that
only certain people have it, have the the gift as
they say, uh, and that they have to be in
this special like you know, mental state to access at
the shinnon the shitting. And then other folks say that
(13:03):
everyone has that potential, but um, some people are just
like in tune with it and some people aren't. And
you follow in none of those three camps. Um, So
we'll talk a little more about some ideas of what
ESP is right after this so Chuck, Um, you said
(13:40):
that basically how people see ESP is either everyone has it,
some people have it, or no one has it. Basically, Uh,
whether you're a skeptic or a believer. Um, if you
are a believer in ESP and somebody comes to you
and says, okay, explain ESP like it is it. There's
(14:01):
actually a couple of very common suggestions or proposals. One
made sense for a while before we knew a little
more about the brain. Um, and that was that EESP
was some form or fashion of the electromagnetic spectrum that
we were receiving information from outside of our usual senses. Yeah.
(14:25):
And like you said, it fell out of favor because, um,
basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves through
time or there. It didn't pick up on special some
special part of your brain that like receives this message.
And there was a UM did you see that study
I sent you? That was I think from two ten
where they put people in an MRI I and then
(14:47):
showed them, um, different pictures or whatever. H And they
did they showed like they I put you in the
wonder machine and now I'm showing you a picture of
flower and that's it. It's lovely, except that it sounds
like a German rave. Okay, a little bit um, but
(15:08):
that would be uh. The non ESP stimuli the control
group to test ESP and to see if the brain
reacted differently, and then to see if there was a
part of the brain that's picking up on ESP. I
would show you the flower, and then in the other room,
I would also show Emily that flower. They think about
it and send you the thought of that flower, So
(15:31):
you're getting ESP stimuli and then non e SP stimuli.
And from the m R I they showed that the
brain didn't react differently, So it suggests that there isn't
a sensory organ or region of the brain that's responsible
for picking up ESP, which doesn't debunk the possibility of ESP.
It just undermines the idea that there's a region of
(15:53):
our brain that would be responsible for picking that up.
Plus of Emily's over there, I'm my first guess is
gonna be dog every time I'm in its flower And
this well, it wasn't about guessing. It was just to see,
like showing you ES the e SP version and then
the non e SP version of the same thing, so
you weren't guessing do you understand. Yeah, I get to know.
(16:13):
I would have guessed dog or wine. There wasn't guessing.
That's the way I guessed. Family thinks she has a
gift a little bit, so she would have been disappointed.
She s, yeah, a little, she thinks. But I think
she's just super observant and intuitive. But that's definitely one
explanation for it, which we'll get too, of course. Um.
(16:35):
So these days there are other theories, one of which
is that, uh, it's called spill over, that there's basically
another dimension that we that doesn't you know, have our
laws here and are dimension and that sometimes stuff just
sort of spills over from that and we see the
future of the past. And if you're a skeptic, you
(16:57):
probably just pulled the decent sized clump of your hair
out of the side of your head at that point. Yeah,
because this is something you can't prove obviously, it's like
completely um And of course they'll say it exactly yeah,
you know. Yeah, And I think I got the impression
from this article that, um, they were making that point
like science is just chasing its tail and trying to
(17:19):
explain esp because it's not currently capable, and science goes
it doesn't work like that, you know, um, at least
with the electromagnetic spectrum explanation, it was pointing to something
that we already know exists, right, It's just that there
(17:39):
there's no way to show that we would be getting
how we would be getting information from it, because the
electromagnetic explanation, it basically says if you compare it to
other findings from ESP, it makes even less sense. Because
with the ESP, one of the hallmarks of it is
that no matter whether you're out there are outside of
(18:00):
the studio thinking about wine or a dog or something
and I'm picking up on it, or if you're in
China and I'm here and we're doing the same thing,
that the signal doesn't weaken at all. Yeah, And that
just flies in the face of all we know about
electromagnetic rights, exactly right. So there's a lot of things
wrong with the proposals of what ESP is. Uh. Yeah.
(18:25):
But you know, the reason why people still believe in
this stuff is because of either hearing a story about
their friend who said, you know, listen to this crazy
thing happened, or experiencing it themselves in some way or another,
having a dream that something similar happened, and all of
a sudden, you're like, I might have the gift exactly,
or it popped up in me, you know, briefly at least.
(18:45):
And there's a I mean, there's a lot of um
evidence of strange and unusual occurrences that support the idea
of esp um. This article gives a really good one
about UM. A book called Futility that was written by
a guy named Morgan robertson right, and in it the
(19:07):
guy details this book or this boat called the titan Ship.
Yeah ship, the boat, a big old boat, um, which
is sailing across the Atlantic and hits an iceberg at
night and sinks and a bunch of people die because
they weren't enough lifeboats. Yeah, this is And if that
sounds familiar, the Titanic did the same exact thing, the Titanic,
(19:30):
not the titan did the same exact thing fourteen years later. Yeah,
if they're there are a bunch of similarities. Um. The
titans struck an iceberg in the book on the starboard
side on an April night in the North Atlantic off
the coast of Newfoundland, and the real Titanic struck an
iceberg on the starboard side in April in the North
Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland on the starless Night.
(19:52):
I don't know about that, Okay, Uh, they were both
said to be unsinkable. Um, more than half of the
passengers of the Titanic perished and more than half of
the passengers and crew on the titan perished. So there's
all these things in there. But you do a little
more digging and you find out that Robertson was he
(20:13):
was a seaman, and he knew a bunch of this stuff.
And it's not unreasonable to think at the time they
wanted to build the biggest ships, and the word titan
it would be a great name back then for a
super big ship. And that sailing route uh was a
common one, and there were icebergs, and April might have
been a common month for that kind of voyage. So
(20:35):
all of it can be explained away kind of um,
but it is definitely something you look at go oh interesting,
It is interesting, and it's amazing coincidence, and it focuses
the attention and captures the imagination. Um. But then yeah,
once you hear about Robertson's background, it becomes slightly less impressive.
So then kind of too over the years that little
(20:57):
Colonel got erased and added to it was that this
idea for this book came to him in a trance,
which bolsters the espy Is that true or is that
just been added? Uh, I'm sure it was added over
the years. Which is a big problem with this kind
of anecdotal evidence is that you know, it gets embellished
in that. Yeah, exactly. And uh, it's just it's not
(21:20):
enough that this is a really interesting, unique circumstance or
coincidence or whatever. There has to be this extra layer
of proof, like it came to him in a trance.
Come on. Yeah. Um. So back to Rhyan, he did
some um. Like I said, in the nineteen thirties, he
started studying the stuff with one of my favorite inventions,
(21:43):
um by his colleague Carl Zenter. Of course, if you
seen Ghostbusters he was using. He was using a version
of Zentner cards. Um. The shapes weren't all exactly. I
think there was one that was different Um and Ghostbusters,
But the original Zentner cards were was a deck of
twenty five Plaine white cards, with each of them had
(22:03):
one of five symbols, a circle plus sign, a square,
a star, five point star and the three wavy lines
like water a river. So what that is? Okay? And
the idea is that, just like in Ghostbusters, you hold
it up and UM asked the you know, not showing
(22:24):
them the card at obviously not the symbol, and say
what do you see? And they say what they see?
And then you record after the deck how many they got? Right? Right,
But the person holding the card is supposed to be
thinking about what they're seeing so that the other person,
the target, the receiver, can pick it up tele telepathically. Yeah,
(22:46):
and I did they have these online? I took the
test yesterday, UM, and I went through the deck and
I only got six out of and at the end
it just said you are not a psychic. Really, Yeah,
that was kind of funny. Statistically speaking for just one trial,
that is more than chance. You did better than chance,
So maybe you do have a touch six of what
(23:08):
what would chance to be a chance would be if
there's five different ones, and so this was six of
twenty four would be uh no, that's not no, that's less. Yeah, No,
you did six of you did, so five of five
(23:28):
would be chance. Okay, so I got one more? Yeah? Well,
and I think like three of the first eight or
so or six I got, and I was like, I've
got the gift, right, but I didn't know, like it's
randomly generated, and so it's not like someone was on
the other side thinking of that card. So I literally
I was like, what do I do? I was like,
I'm just guessing. So that brings up some interesting stuff,
(23:51):
like there's there's um evidence that when a machine is
involved that there is no telepathy. There would only be clairvoyance. Right,
So I mean if if if telepathy is you picking
up what's in someone else's mind and the computer is mindless,
then you shouldn't be able what you were saying, like
(24:12):
you should it shouldn't You should not be able to
know what zenter card it's going to pick next. Right,
But there have been investigations using computers and using machines
that show above chance that there is some sort of
weird interaction like a random number generators. So Princeton University
has a department called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Department.
(24:36):
Pair right and pair has been doing studies for a
couple of decades. The millions of trials and basically they'll
say this is a random number generator or this this
machine operates randomly or whatever. We want you to think
of a number, and we want to see if you
can influence the numbers that this computer spits out. Oh
(24:56):
so you're thinking of the number, then you're okay. The
human is trying to affect the computer, the output the
behavior of the computer. Of course, if you're sitting across
the room or in another room thinking about a number
that a random generator should put out, it should have
zero effect whatsoever. It's a computer. The weird thing is
(25:16):
is what Princeton has found is that yes, over enough trials,
you there is a slight, very slight, but measurable effect
that human thought has on a random number generator. It's
it's on Princeton's website. And this is stuff that like
is apparently accepted in the in the scientific community that
the the the trials that they are running are so
(25:41):
widespread and so repeatable and have been done so many
times that the data that they're coming up with is
is it's significant. Well, Ryan, with his inner card experiments
in the thirties did find that some people um got
what they thought were pretty impressive results. It's like, you know,
a few I can't remember their names, but Hubert Pierce
(26:03):
was he one of them. He was the one how
many what was his percentage? He had one where he got, um,
remember how you got three in a row and you're like,
oh my god, he got twenty five in a row once.
Come on, no, I'm not kidding. He was also documented
iss selecting five hundred and fifty eight correct out of
eight hundred and fifty which is the odds of that
(26:26):
happening by chance, We're twenty two billion to one. Now,
were these the early experiments? Because okay, because I did
read that UM and this seems like I can't believe
he didn't check this. Apparently the early cards were a
little translucent. Oh yeah, some of them were. And then
he corrected for that and the and the percentages went
(26:47):
down and then they U I know other scientists said
that you are somehow influencing with your body. Tell like
you basically you don't have a good enough poker face. Yeah,
And the earliest um Ryan experiments with the center cards,
he would hold the card up and he'd be making
eye contact right right the guy. Yeah, the guess it
(27:09):
would be like is it the way line? And yeah,
he start shaking his head almost imperceptive. Um, but he
uh he, that's called sensory leakage, where you the person
who is um holding the card and knows where the
card is somehow, there's some detail about your face that
when you do a thousand trials with somebody, they start
(27:32):
to pick up on and it affects their guests. That
influences their guests. So to um correct for that, to
control for that a sensory leakage in that um, they
they came up with something called the gans Field experiment. Yes,
that's a German gunsfeld Um that means whole field in German.
(27:54):
And that is when they started putting people um, they
would start depriving their other sense is basically, uh, they
would be in a like a dimly lit room with
red lighting and they would have white noise, and they
would have their eyes covered with these uh special glasses
or ping pong balls cut in half like Kermit the fraud.
(28:14):
I guess later on they said, we should just make
some classes exactly We've got the funding. So basically the
idea was, let's rule out any uh any of that
gross censury leakage, which smells um. So yeah, Apparently later
on in Rhyan's experiments. Um, after he started controlling for stuff,
(28:37):
the percentages started to drop. Yeah. Correct, Um, he's he was.
Also he's generally a respected researcher for a couple of reasons. One,
whenever he did whenever evidence of like um, some sort
of bias or fraud or something was brought to him,
he corrected for it. He wore glasses in a white right.
(29:00):
That was another one. Um. But also he was daring
enough to stake his entire career on a field of
study that will get anybody mocked publicly privately. Um, can
really shut down a lot of opportunities for you. This
guy and his wife, Louisa Ryan both dedicated their careers
(29:24):
to establishing the field of parapsychology and really studying it
and then just walking away from it. I don't think
he was like, I really want to prove this is true?
Was he? Uh? Yes, he did? That was that was
a huge criticism of him. He was a definite believer. Um.
He was quoted by I don't know what the guy's
(29:47):
steal was, but one day he was visited by one
person and the interviewer who went on to write a
paper I think in scientific American to expose him. He
said he kept a file of people of the results
of tests where um, people he suspected were purposefully getting
things wrong because they didn't like him to mess with
(30:10):
his data, he just took those and never published him.
He didn't include him in the results, which would definitely
affect the number of correct hits. Right. Um, that was
a huge criticism. That's not good science at all. But
he was definitely a believer, which was another criticism. But
he was daring and he did um. There was another
(30:30):
story where it's called the Levy affair where a guy
named Levy, who was an electrical engineer working in the lab,
unplugged uh, I guess the censor that would correct negative
hits for a little while during a trial, so that
all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits,
um and so, and then he plugged it back in. Well,
(30:52):
this one guy saw what the guy was doing and
went to Ryan. And Ryan went to the guy Levy
and said, did you do this? And let me say,
just it's like you're fired, and just like through the
results away and all that. So he wasn't like he
was a true believer, but he wasn't just some like
outright fraud, right right, But he was and still is
under the microscope as much as probably any researcher in
(31:13):
all of academia ever has been. All right, well, right
after this break, we'll talk a little bit about what
skeptics say about ESP All right, Josh. One thing you'll
(31:38):
hear skeptics say a lot is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And I have to agree with him, and Uh, it
is an extraordinary claim here. And UM, so far there
hasn't been um extraordinary evidence. And one of the things
I pointed to earlier that I think is what's going
on if you look at statistics, you look at six
(31:59):
billion people on planet Earth, uh, and them thinking a
good zillion things each day. And that is scientific, by
the way. Um, at some point somebody is going to
think something that it mirrors something that happens in the
near future. Uh, And it's just chance and coincidence. I
have a great example of that, man. It happened this
(32:21):
very morning. Yeah I did. Um. I was at the printer.
You know, we just moved offices, and I was at
the printer and I had like an extra piece of
paper that I didn't need, and I realized, like, we
have no paper recycling here. So on my way back
yet that is everyone out there. It's like, what kind
of office would have, right, we just said we have
a we have a fifty gallon drum that we throw
(32:42):
stuff into that it catches on fire and then we
send it up a burning drum, that's what it's called.
Now we're getting those soon, um, right, and we are
getting hip soon. I know this because on my way
back to my desk, I popped into Izzy, the I
T guy who's also the head of all recycling and
stuff here. It's like, is he need a paper recycling
bins by the printer? And he goes, I'm writing an
(33:06):
email right now to everybody about that very thing. You
almost did your USY impression close, um, And so like
I thought about it. That's pretty amazing, you know. But
it was about nine in the morning, and this is
a company wide email, so it would be something that
is he would probably knock out about that time. The
(33:27):
reason I was thinking of is because I was just
at the printer. We just moved into this office and
we didn't have bins yet, so it was still a
potential thing for somebody to be thinking about. Or doing
or writing an email about UM. And so there's all
these different really overlooked variables or factors to this whole
thing that that you don't think of. Instead, it just
(33:48):
seems like an amazing coincidence or ESP. To me, the
really significant thing was that I happened to be researching
ESP while this happened. That's what it really kind of
stood out to me. But if you really kind of
look at it, like, there's a finite amount of things
that people could think about in any given day, in
any giving context, in an office or something like that.
(34:09):
Like had I been a goat at a petting zoo
and I went over and UM talked to the cow
and the cow was writing the email about recycling bins. Maybe,
but we're in an office. I'm talking to the guy
about recycling bins. There's just a lot of stuff that
you kind of once you take that into account, it
(34:30):
becomes less amazing. Like like the the guy writing the
Titan Titanic book. Yeah, you know, I used to happen
to me, now that I think of it, is UM.
I used to And this it's weird. It was only
with phone land lines that hadn't happened with the cell phone.
But I used to like, no, the phone was gonna
ring right before it rang, like almost go to reach
for it. Um. And I mean it's not like it
(34:52):
happened all the time, but it happened enough times where
I was like, that's weird. Sure, I know what you're
talking about, but and that was all it was to me.
I was not like I the gift. But think about
it in in that respect to you know people, So
was it you knew who was calling or just that
the phone was about to just that it was about
to ring. Now, yeah, that is weird. You definitely do
have esp yeah, um. Or maybe I don't know, maybe
(35:18):
the phone made a little tick noise right before it
rang that I didn't pick up on, but only subconsciously.
You know. Well that's another explanation for today that um right,
that um there is uh subliminal stuff in the environment
that is just too weak in nature for us to
pick up on consciously, but our unconscious does or subconscious does,
(35:42):
which frankly opens up a whole other can of worms.
You know, as far as you know, how real is
that kind of thing there? But probably a little closer
to reality is the idea that um our attention isn't
focused on everything that we're picking up at all times,
like like I see your beard and I see your
shirt and everything, but I'm still also picking up like
(36:03):
sensory information from like Jerry's computer that I can see
in my peripheral vision or whatever. My attention isn't focused
on it, but my brain is still receiving information. So
the idea that our brains can put it together all
this information that we're not aware consciously that we're receiving, um,
but we're still getting impressions from it. That'sh that that
could be a great explanation for ESP as well. Yeah,
(36:26):
and you know what, now that I think about it,
the fact that it's never happened with my cell phone
sort of makes sense because maybe there it was a
mechanical function a landline, right, Yeah, like you said a
click or a tick, but I think you meant like
a click And it wasn't even the newer model. This
was back in the day when it was like yeah,
ringing like bell, So maybe that does explain it. Yeah,
(36:49):
I've got another good example that I came across and
researching this. UM. Let's say that you and I are
hanging out and you're humming baby, I'm five work right,
just over and over again. I don't know that song,
but I'm reading Yes you do, No, don't, Yeah you do? It?
Was it Katy Perry? I don't know Katy Perry anyway, um,
(37:10):
although I will have to say I did love that
halftime show. It was great, well it was. It was hysterical.
What's up with the sharks being a meme? Now? I
would think they were really significant. She looked like she
was worked at corn Dog on a Stick. I don't
know what that is. That's not all corn dogs around sticks.
It's that place in our hot Dog on a Stick
that was called that place in the mall where they
(37:30):
wore those big giant Yeah. No, I don't know anything
about Katy Perry. But it was the funniest most but
like the crazy just kept coming and coming, and I
was like, this is the best thing I've ever seen.
So anyway, in this universe, you're well aware of Katy
Perry and her song Firework, and you're humming it to yourself.
But I'm sitting there reading The New Yorker and I'm
(37:52):
engrossed in it and not I don't notice that you
get up to go make some nachos, and you come
back in, and you catch my attention because you're you're
coming back in with some nachos and they smell awesome.
And now my attention is directed to you, and you're
still humming Firework, right, And I'm like, I was just
thinking about that song Firework. I had that in my head.
(38:13):
How crazy we must be connected. I didn't realize that
you had been humming it earlier, and beneath my awareness
I picked it up. Although once I became aware that
you were humming it, it seemed to me like I
had ESP. Well, yeah, and that ties into another explanation
is that people who do seem to have that gift
are just really really hyper observant on minute details, like
(38:37):
the same people that can pick up on micro expressions. Um,
they might feel like they have the gift because they're
just really in tune to what's going on around them
or not just you know, like a big lunk head
walking around. So a lot of people who believe in
the ESP say, yes, we agree with that, especially parapsychology researchers,
and there are still plenty of respected ones out there.
(39:00):
Is a guy named darry O Bem. Yeah, I saw
that thing. He said. He's been doing this for a
while now legitimately we should talk about him. But there
to button up that point, there is UM a lot
of parapsychologists or even just plain old psychologists who are
researching ESPUM who say, yes, that definitely most likely accounts
(39:23):
for almost all of it, and that's good for us
to be thinking about that, and that in and of
itself deserves like academic inquiry and research. Right, But there
are still some experience experiments that are being produced by
guys like Darry Obem that UM are showing some weird
results that go beyond this kind of explanation. Yeah. And
(39:44):
and one of the problems, well we'll talk about the
problems with even this research um about it being reproducible
in a second. But he did a couple of experiments.
This is from NPR. Crow wrote this, Yeah, from from
from radio LAMB Nice. I didn't know that, um. These
are the two that he pointed out. He did nine
different experiments, but the two that he highlighted was at Cornell,
(40:08):
which is where bim is a does his work. Right. Yeah,
and he's again a very respected psychologist, and this study
that of these experiments was published in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, which is a respected journal. Yeah, um,
so they The first one was a computer quiz. They
took a hundred students, fifty males and fifty women, and um. Basically,
(40:32):
they showed a computer screen with two little curtains on it,
side by side and said, behind one is nothing a
brick wall, and behind the other is something sexy. Yeah,
some kind of you know, I was about to call
it pornographic, but who knows. Maybe it's art erodess. Yeah, gross, Um,
(40:57):
that just makes you feel like you're dad saying it
or something. Yeah, well, this room too small for you
to say. Um. So basically he would say, you tell me, um,
what what you think you're going to see? And they
were all hooked up to uh two machines to read
the you know, they're what's going on in their body
of course, and um, you would think it would be
a fifty results, but they actually got a fifty three
(41:19):
point one percent result for the what UH craw Witch
calls erotic stimuli. Um. And basically they they think, or
at least that's what BEM thinks, is that one possibility
is that if there's if they think they're going to
see something erotically stimulating, then um, it got passed back
(41:43):
through time. Yeah, that's kind of his position, is that
retrocognition thing. Yeah, that they somehow their future selves who
saw the erotic image was stimulated enough that that stimulation
traveled backwards three seconds and influenced their choice because they
were they would be slightly stimulated physiologically right before they guess.
(42:05):
And he said, before the computer even chose which which
one to show? Right, they right, they were making their
choices often correct, Um, before the computer chose to show
an erotic or non erotic image. And it doesn't sound
like much, but crow which points out a couple of things.
One that um, when there was a control group that
(42:26):
was shown just non erotic pictures, they did forty nine
eight percent correct, which is chance. They're all not happy, right,
They're like, we don't want to be the control They're like,
can we get a little steamier in here? Um? But
and he he also pointed out that fifty three point one,
to be specific, doesn't sound like much, but um, apparently
(42:50):
that's a point two percent chance where on a scale
between zero and one, where zero is it's not going
to happen, and one is that it's definitely gonna happen.
And apparently, as far as um correlation goes, or links
between two things something affecting another, a point too is
(43:12):
about the same as the link between aspirin and heart
attack prevention. Um, the link between calcium and taken bone mass,
the link between second hand smoke and lung cancer. So
things that are touted is like, pay attention to this, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So so stuff that we accepted is like, yeah, yeah,
if you're around second hand smoke you can get cancer
(43:34):
from has the same exactly it is and um. Later on,
a meta analysis of Bem's experiments, some other experiments that
were carried out afterward, and then some other experiments all
grouped together. A meta analysis showed that um, they they weren't.
It wasn't statistically significant if you took all of the
(43:57):
existing body of literature of these experiment but it was
a New Scientist article, and um, it was pretty cool.
In the comments section, somebody said, yeah, it's not reproducible,
but a lot of science isn't reproducible. And it reminded
me of our scientific method episode where like apparently a
lot of um trials that that like pharmaceuticals are based
(44:22):
on aren't reproducible. Wasn't it like them? Which doesn't surprise
me of course. Yeah, all right. And then there was
this other experiment that I need you to explain to
me because I didn't understand it. Okay, you're ready, Like
I got the first part, but I didn't. I didn't.
It didn't make sense to me because it's a little
mind blowing. So you know how like if you are
studying something and you write it down, it gets in
(44:44):
your brain a little more so that when you're tested
on it later, uh, you will recall it more easily. Yeah,
that's a common study method, write something down. So Bem
carried out a very simple experiment that did the opposite
of that. First, he showed some people a bunch of
a bunch of words, forty eight random words. I think
now it's like tree or something like that, and he
(45:06):
told them to visualize it though, right, right, So they
saw all forty eight words and thought about them, not
visualized the letters, but visualized the thing, right, like see
the tree, and just just to kind of try to
memorize all forty eight words. Then the computer randomly selected
twenty four of those words, and then after they'd done that,
BEM gave them a test of recall to see how
(45:29):
many they recalled right. So the people I had to
type out the the the words they recalled. Then after that,
the computer randomly selected twenty four of the forty eight
words for the people to type after they had already
taken the test of recall. And those twenty four words
(45:51):
are the ones that people more consistently got right on
the earlier tests. So it's it's another example of that
retroco mission that these people getting the words in their
heads after the tests somehow went backward and influenced their
recall and memory for the test that they took before
(46:11):
they learned them. That makes more sense a little, Yeah,
it is a little let's see, time travel melts my
brain too, right. So this guy published this stuff in
like two thousand and ten, and like it was, it
made a huge, huge splash, huge criticism. The academic journal
was criticized, and Ben was you know, pilloried and all that.
(46:31):
But he's still you know, put out these these very reproducible, understandable,
simple exercises that still showed statistically speaking, there were some
significant results that went beyond chance. So when it comes
to debunking UM esp one thing that you're not gonna
you know, you said fraud, You're not gonna see a
(46:51):
lot of people call researchers outright frauds because that's just
sort of a dangerous thing to say. Sure, it's not nice, um,
but there are people out there who I guess or
criticized for, you know, basically trying to call out UM.
And this is something completely different. But these these on
stage psychic shows like crossing Over with John Edwards, Yeah,
(47:14):
like it's easy to pick those people out and say
you're a big fraud and this is not true of course,
And all you're doing is cold reading. Uh cold reading
we talked about in the Animal Um Pet Psychics episode.
That's basically when you get up on stage and you say, sir,
I'm sensing um someone there you're having some trouble with
with another man in your life. Uh with the name
(47:39):
of j or or is it h or oh, or
maybe it's p Yes, p my my boss, Uh Peter, Yes,
yes exactly. And that's all a cold reading is. It's
throwing out these really broad things that anyone can latch onto.
So it's really easy to call uh, those people out.
And there's a guy, um sort of a guy famous
for doing that. His name is um James Randy, and
(48:02):
he's famous for his offer of one million dollars to
anyone that can prove their psychic ability, which of course
no one stepped up to do that. But then he
gets pooh pooed a little bit, like you're just making
a mockery of trying to legitimately disprove something. And mockery
is absolutely the right word. And to me, the presence
(48:23):
of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity, right, So, like
what you're dealing with then with a guy like that,
is uh, a set of beliefs, a belief system running
up against another belief system, just like a couple of
religions or something like that. It's not objectivity against fraud
or anything like that. It's belief against belief or something.
(48:46):
Um And and yeah, the idea of lumping together John
Edwards with Darryl bem is just that's, you know, fraudulent
in and of itself. Yeah, that's just they call that theatrics,
just like the on stage h theatrics of a stage psychic. Yeah,
so I believe. I totally agree. Yeah, you know I
I do too. I think there's a definite room for
(49:09):
a healthy scientific inquiry into just about anything, whether skeptics
believe in it or not. If you can get some
funding for it, who cares. That's my motto. You got
anything else on ESP? Uh? Let me think? No, I've
got one more thing I found. I came across the
(49:31):
I think five Nightline with Ted Coppele, where, Um, the
news broke that the CIA had been studying ESP and
trying to do remote viewing what Ronson was talking about
in The Men Who Stare at Coats when it finally
became declassified. In take, coppled like a twenty minute Nightline
segment on it totally worth watching. It's some pretty softball questions.
(49:55):
But Robert Gates, who would later become the the head
of Defense, he's on there just basically trying as politely
as possible to show that he does not believe in
any of this. Even so, here's the pharmacy. I a director,
and um, it's just neat. Unlus you get to watch
Copple again. I miss he was great news man. Yeah,
I miss those dudes. I miss. Uh, I was just
(50:17):
thinking yesterday about broke call. Yeah, rather I was. I
was always a broke coll man. Did you I like
Peter Jennings He was great? Yeah. I don't even all
of them were great. I don't even have any idea
who does Night in the News now I don't watch it.
It was Brian Williams until about a day ago. Did
he get fired? He like got I know, the whole kerfuffle,
(50:37):
but he didn't get fired. I'm using my ESP to
predict that by the time this came, this comes out,
he will not be there anymore. I think this is
getting big quick interesting. Yeah, Twitter is involved, man, the
Twitter takedown. Uh. If you want them more about ESP,
the internet was virtually set up for you to go
(51:00):
find out more about it. Um, you can start by
typing ESP in the search far at how stuff works
dot com. Since I said that it's time for a
listener mail, yeah, before we do listener mail, I just
want to give a quick shout out to my buddy
Isaac McNairy. Uh. If you remember, I did a Judge
John Hodgman episode with Emily in which I did a
bad home renovation and um, this dude stuff you should know.
(51:23):
Listener from Kansas carpenter. Master carpenter said, hey, man, I'll
come and stay with you and help you do your
your project. They're right, And I said this sounds crazy,
and he actually came and did it and it looks
awesome and he's a super cool guy. And if you're
in Kansas near Elder Rado, Kansas, there's no better guy
(51:43):
to hire of El Dorado, it's Elder Rado. Actually, Okay,
he has a point out, but um, not only is
he a great carpenter and a cool guy, but he
works with a nonprofit called Outreach Program. Uh and you
can find an outreach program dot org where they're basically
feeding the world. They package food and they get people
together in a room and package these mass quantities of
(52:06):
food to send to other countries and feed the hungry.
And he's just a really good dude. So thanks to
Isaac for that, and my kitchen was looking good. So
again for his nonprofit that is Outreach Program dot org.
And if you need a great carpenter and you're in Kansas,
check out Retrofit Remodeling. All right, listener, mail, I'm gonna
(52:27):
call this pronunciation help. Hey guys, I'm a botanist and
just want to throw throw your rope to help you
out with pronouncing plant family names. All plant family names
end in a C E A E. Oh yeah, I
thought we got that wrong. Uh, it is a mess
of vowels. Guys, when you read it, you should just
imagine you were spelling a C E as in a CE.
(52:53):
So when you read a plant family name, just break
off the CE and read the first part and then
spell a C. So the plant family for poison oak
is uh Ana cardia Anna cardia ce. So it's just
Anna cardi A C. I remember it by imagining the
aneurysm and cardiac arrest I would have if I fell
(53:16):
into it. A N, A C A R D. I
what well she spelled out Anna cardi. Oh got the
first two uh, first letters from each of those words. Anyway,
Guys who love your podcast find it endearing when you too,
puzzle out on pronunciations. Um see see that's good to know. Yeah,
so I love you, bunches, And that is from Jane
(53:38):
and she said ps. In Europe, they pronounced plant families
completely differently. Um other parts see other parts of the
US might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is
standard in California. Well, okay, what a c C. I
(54:00):
You want to let us know something that we should
have known before we even recorded, But you're generous enough
with your time and effort to correct us. I guess
there's a way to put it. We that was very helpful.
Thanks a lot, Jane. If you want to be like
Jane in other words, you can tweet to us at
s Y s K podcast. You can join us on
Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can
(54:21):
send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff
works dot com, and as always, you can join us
at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
is it how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there. I
didn't even have to look why, I just knew, yes,
(00:22):
and dudes and do debts. We are in our new studio. Yeah,
can you tell? Does its sound different? It's the very
first one and um it's tiny. Wait what do you mean?
It's the very first one, very very first podcast we
recorded in here. Yeah, I was gonna say, I said tiny,
but it's not tiny. It's cozy. But it is our
(00:44):
all ours, Yeah, how ours. Everybody else at house Stuff
Works doesn't really know that yet, but they will. Uh yeah,
because when we actually have butt detection and when someone
sits down these seats that aren't LSD to get a
shock and plus an alarm goes off at our desks,
what's called d M R T M. I how are you, sir?
(01:05):
I'm pretty good. I feel like this is fancy. This
is our first real like studio. That's not true, not no,
I'm trying to remember the last one was no. But
it's not a utility closet. It's not a lactation room.
It's not Yeah, it's not a murder room. It's not
like an office with like desk for like office furniture. Yeah,
(01:25):
it's a it's a studio that was built out for
the specific purpose of recording podcasts. All we have to
do is put up our Aaron Cooper originals. The artwork,
got a couple of those waiting, and we gotta work
on the lighting in here a little bit. Yeah, Jerius,
it's such gonna hang some china balls for us. Yes,
you keep pushing the china balls. Um so, anyway, enough
(01:47):
about that. We just wanted to say we're super excited
to be in our new office, in our new studio.
It does feel good. Kudos for that intro. I'm not
gonna say that. I knew you were going to say that. Yeah,
I was going to say that too. I knew that
you were thinking of saying that. Chuck. Yes, uh ESP.
(02:10):
Do you believe in ESP? No? No, not at all.
What do you think it is? Because surely, I mean
just about anyone could agree that humans have some sort
of ability somehow to make good guesses or to the future,
whatever you want to call it. Do you agree or
(02:30):
do you think it's strictly just us selectively paying attention
to random instances over others. I think it's that. And yeah,
and as we'll talk about, I think it's the just
the nature of coincidence is going to happen because so
many things happen every day, Uh, that something is bound
(02:54):
to seem like something you dreamed about the night before
at some point in your life. Yeah. But the other
millions of dreams you have that, don't I think those
are the ones that are the the tell you know,
do you? I don't know, like I want to. I
spent so many years of my life believing and stuff
(03:14):
like that and wanting to go to to Duke University
to study at their paras psychology department believe. Yeah, and
but you know, believing in ghosts and all this and
just that's how I spent my childhood just reading about
stuff like that voraciously. So Ghostbusters really did a number
on you. Yeah. Yeah. When that came along, I was like,
(03:35):
this was made for me. Um. But as an adult,
it's not so much that I believe in the esp
it's more that I UM, I refused to just utterly
disbelieve in the possibility of it. Okay, you know what
I mean. Yeah, I got you there, because we don't
know everything about everything yet, right, but uh yeah, I'm
(03:58):
in the I'm the other camp. And I'm not even
say the skeptic camp because there's people just plug me
bad name some due to some bad apples. Not all skeptics,
but there are some that are horses asses. Can we
say that? I don't know, we'll find out. Um, All right,
well let's talk about And I thought this was interesting
(04:19):
because I never knew that uh ESP is just a
big collective term for all manner of uh paranormal paranormal phenomena,
which you could also call SI. Yeah, and so dude
named jb Ryan, who will talk about later, he coined
ESP the granddaddy. And then in the forties another guy
coined the term sigh and sigh is the Greek letter
(04:42):
and it's equated with psyche or the soul. And the
reason that the guy chose SI is because he felt
ESP suggested it was something supernatural, and SI, he felt,
suggested that this is a normal part of humanity we
just don't understand and it's it sounds like science, right, Um.
(05:04):
But there are several categories of ESP UM and this
is the one. I never knew the actual definitions for these.
I sort of just threw them all in a bag together.
You have telepathy, and that's when you can you know,
you're over there reading my thoughts. Yes, like Chuck is
really not happy to be in the new studio. That's
not true. He'd rather be at home on the couch.
I'm reading your thoughts right now, and I know that
(05:25):
you like this place. Okay, Well, you're you're a telepath. Uh. Clairvoyance,
which is the ability to see events or things objects
happening somewhere else at the same time. So are you
doing Are you a clairvoyant? I am. I'm seeing your
couch right now, and I'm saying it's not that comfy. Yeah,
so you're not missing that much at the moment. I
(05:45):
know somewhere Jonathan Strickland is waxing his head, bald head.
That's just the logical assumption. Uh. Then we have our
precogs precognition. That's when you see into the future. Retrocogs
retro cognition. You can see into the distant past. That's
there's another um that's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition,
(06:07):
like seeing you know a cave like took took running
around with the dinosaurs like you do, which I guess
never would have happened. Um. But there's another term for retrocognition,
whereas something in the future affects something in the past.
So a decision you make in the future affects your past.
And an example given is that, um, you have a
(06:29):
dream about a dinosaur. Now, let's a spotted dog, and
then the first thing the next morning, you go outside
to water your lawn and the same spotted dog or
a similar spotted dog walks by. The idea isn't that
that was very coincidental or that you had esp and
your dreams, but that you seeing that dog in the
(06:50):
morning affected your dream the night before. So that's another
definition that's emerging for retrocognition. That's getting a lot of
traction because of the stuff we're finding on the quantum scale,
just weirdness like that. All right, Then you have your
mediumship and that's um ms Cleo who can channel dead
spirits forgot about her? And then you have how much
(07:12):
money that woman grossed in the nineties. She made a
lot of though I hope so yeah, I mean, she
was working hard, she had a finite window of opportunity,
and she worked that whole time. She didn't like buy
a sailboat and sail around the world after like a
first million. You know, like she worked. So you're not
in the camp of like she's taking people's money and
(07:33):
taking advantage of people. I see that argument, sure, for sure.
I also see like if people want to spend their
money on that and they get something out of it,
knock yourself out. Uh. And then you have a psychometry,
which is the ability to read info about a person place,
uh by touching the person object. And that's what I
(07:55):
like to call the dead zone. Christopher Walking, he would
place his hands on you and he would see something. Man.
I think we talked about it recently about how that
movie holds up. Still. Yeah, it's such a good movie. Yeah,
it really is good. Chris Walking. There's another one, Chuck
Um called telekinesis, which is like Uri Geller stroking a
(08:17):
spoon and it bending right, like being able to manipulate
matter just using a light touch or your mind, but
there is no spoon. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't that from
matrix Um. All right, So basically, uh, like you said,
J b Ryan is the the granddaddy of all this,
(08:39):
and he actually started studying. I mean, he was a
legitimate scientist, he wasn't some quack. And uh, this was
in the nineteen thirties where he started at Duke University
studying para para psychology basically. And he wasn't the first.
He was one of the first UM laboratory experimenters in
academia to really study SI. Right before him, probably about
(09:02):
forty or so years before him, William James and some
of his pals at the Society for Psychical Research UM
really laid the groundwork for applying the scientific method to
the study of paranormal phenomenon. And they did two things.
They outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like very famously Madame Blevartsky.
(09:25):
But then they also investigated ones like they approached them
typically with like an open mind UM, and if they
found somebody that they just couldn't explain, they would they
studied them. So they were they were studying each one
with an open mind. And the ones they figured out
where frauds they outed as frauds. The ones they figured
out couldn't quite explain, they sought to investigate scientifically rather
(09:49):
than just saying, oh, they're frauds somehow. So that was
the groundwork of the study of sigh. What was Madame
Blevartsky Steel of the Cony Allen She was she actually
she was almost a cult leader. You could argue she
was she um. She created um. Oh man, it's called
(10:09):
like theodism, I think, which is um. It was. It
was almost a cult. It was a huge um movement
in the nineteenth century where like you go to like
a seance and there was a medium there and they
would channel like the spirits of the dead, relatives of
people who were they're holding hands in the circle and
stuff like that. And she gained a lot of power
(10:31):
and wealth and prestige until she was outed as as
a fraud. And I don't remember the the it's theosophy,
that's what it is. Not to see theo is m.
Theo ism has to do with theo Huxtable. Uh did
you see The Source Family, by the way, that documentary. No,
I haven't about the l a cult in the seventies.
I saw the the Icon on Netflix and never clicked
(10:54):
as a good it's really good and it's it's it's awesome. Actually,
I recommend everyone it's one of those where like they
interview a lot of them today and they weren't like,
you know, they didn't commit suicide. Like everyone was like
it was pretty great. Oh yeah, yeah, they're all fine.
They're all just a bunch of hippies. Still. They were
out in l A. Yeah, yeah, right in Hollywood. There
(11:15):
was one and um, there was a documentary I saw
about a cult in Miami and they were like super
fundamentalist Christian but they also were um the basis of
their religion was was formed on pot too. Well that's
what the Source family was. I wonder if they were related. Well,
it was the seventies. Yeah, there were a lot of
(11:37):
pot cults, I bet. But did they turn into like
huge pot dealers. No, I don't think so. This cult
they had a band though, and the called the Source.
You know, I can't remember the name of the band,
but it's pretty interesting to transfer that. It's a really
good documentary. That was just funny to see all these people.
Now they're like it was awesome. Yeah. I had a
(11:58):
lot of sex and smoked a lot of weed. That's
kind of what they These guys didn't seem to have
a lot of sex though they were like real, like um,
compartmentalized gender wise and like male dominance and all that.
But they just smoked a ton of pot all the time,
including their little kids. Well that's not like like four
year old smoke. That's terrible. Yeah. There it was in
(12:18):
the documentaries we're seeing. I don't remember what you had
me up? You lost me there. I lost everybody there
in that documentary. Yeah. Um, all right, So back to
this ESP thing, um, jb Ryan, Yeah, jb Ryan. Well,
basically there's a there's a lot of different outlooks on
what ESP might be. Um, some people think that everyone's
(12:39):
got it, but some people, um, it just pops up
every now and then, um, like I might have a
dream that comes true or whatever. Other people think that
only certain people have it, have the the gift as
they say, uh, and that they have to be in
this special like you know, mental state to access at
the shinnon the shitting. And then other folks say that
(13:03):
everyone has that potential, but um, some people are just
like in tune with it and some people aren't. And
you follow in none of those three camps. Um, So
we'll talk a little more about some ideas of what
ESP is right after this so Chuck, Um, you said
(13:40):
that basically how people see ESP is either everyone has it,
some people have it, or no one has it. Basically, Uh,
whether you're a skeptic or a believer. Um, if you
are a believer in ESP and somebody comes to you
and says, okay, explain ESP like it is it. There's
(14:01):
actually a couple of very common suggestions or proposals. One
made sense for a while before we knew a little
more about the brain. Um, and that was that EESP
was some form or fashion of the electromagnetic spectrum that
we were receiving information from outside of our usual senses. Yeah.
(14:25):
And like you said, it fell out of favor because, um,
basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves through
time or there. It didn't pick up on special some
special part of your brain that like receives this message.
And there was a UM did you see that study
I sent you? That was I think from two ten
where they put people in an MRI I and then
(14:47):
showed them, um, different pictures or whatever. H And they
did they showed like they I put you in the
wonder machine and now I'm showing you a picture of
flower and that's it. It's lovely, except that it sounds
like a German rave. Okay, a little bit um, but
(15:08):
that would be uh. The non ESP stimuli the control
group to test ESP and to see if the brain
reacted differently, and then to see if there was a
part of the brain that's picking up on ESP. I
would show you the flower, and then in the other room,
I would also show Emily that flower. They think about
it and send you the thought of that flower, So
(15:31):
you're getting ESP stimuli and then non e SP stimuli.
And from the m R I they showed that the
brain didn't react differently, So it suggests that there isn't
a sensory organ or region of the brain that's responsible
for picking up ESP, which doesn't debunk the possibility of ESP.
It just undermines the idea that there's a region of
(15:53):
our brain that would be responsible for picking that up.
Plus of Emily's over there, I'm my first guess is
gonna be dog every time I'm in its flower And
this well, it wasn't about guessing. It was just to see,
like showing you ES the e SP version and then
the non e SP version of the same thing, so
you weren't guessing do you understand. Yeah, I get to know.
(16:13):
I would have guessed dog or wine. There wasn't guessing.
That's the way I guessed. Family thinks she has a
gift a little bit, so she would have been disappointed.
She s, yeah, a little, she thinks. But I think
she's just super observant and intuitive. But that's definitely one
explanation for it, which we'll get too, of course. Um.
(16:35):
So these days there are other theories, one of which
is that, uh, it's called spill over, that there's basically
another dimension that we that doesn't you know, have our
laws here and are dimension and that sometimes stuff just
sort of spills over from that and we see the
future of the past. And if you're a skeptic, you
(16:57):
probably just pulled the decent sized clump of your hair
out of the side of your head at that point. Yeah,
because this is something you can't prove obviously, it's like
completely um And of course they'll say it exactly yeah,
you know. Yeah, And I think I got the impression
from this article that, um, they were making that point
like science is just chasing its tail and trying to
(17:19):
explain esp because it's not currently capable, and science goes
it doesn't work like that, you know, um, at least
with the electromagnetic spectrum explanation, it was pointing to something
that we already know exists, right, It's just that there
(17:39):
there's no way to show that we would be getting
how we would be getting information from it, because the
electromagnetic explanation, it basically says if you compare it to
other findings from ESP, it makes even less sense. Because
with the ESP, one of the hallmarks of it is
that no matter whether you're out there are outside of
(18:00):
the studio thinking about wine or a dog or something
and I'm picking up on it, or if you're in
China and I'm here and we're doing the same thing,
that the signal doesn't weaken at all. Yeah, And that
just flies in the face of all we know about
electromagnetic rights, exactly right. So there's a lot of things
wrong with the proposals of what ESP is. Uh. Yeah.
(18:25):
But you know, the reason why people still believe in
this stuff is because of either hearing a story about
their friend who said, you know, listen to this crazy
thing happened, or experiencing it themselves in some way or another,
having a dream that something similar happened, and all of
a sudden, you're like, I might have the gift exactly,
or it popped up in me, you know, briefly at least.
(18:45):
And there's a I mean, there's a lot of um
evidence of strange and unusual occurrences that support the idea
of esp um. This article gives a really good one
about UM. A book called Futility that was written by
a guy named Morgan robertson right, and in it the
(19:07):
guy details this book or this boat called the titan Ship.
Yeah ship, the boat, a big old boat, um, which
is sailing across the Atlantic and hits an iceberg at
night and sinks and a bunch of people die because
they weren't enough lifeboats. Yeah, this is And if that
sounds familiar, the Titanic did the same exact thing, the Titanic,
(19:30):
not the titan did the same exact thing fourteen years later. Yeah,
if they're there are a bunch of similarities. Um. The
titans struck an iceberg in the book on the starboard
side on an April night in the North Atlantic off
the coast of Newfoundland, and the real Titanic struck an
iceberg on the starboard side in April in the North
Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland on the starless Night.
(19:52):
I don't know about that, Okay, Uh, they were both
said to be unsinkable. Um, more than half of the
passengers of the Titanic perished and more than half of
the passengers and crew on the titan perished. So there's
all these things in there. But you do a little
more digging and you find out that Robertson was he
(20:13):
was a seaman, and he knew a bunch of this stuff.
And it's not unreasonable to think at the time they
wanted to build the biggest ships, and the word titan
it would be a great name back then for a
super big ship. And that sailing route uh was a
common one, and there were icebergs, and April might have
been a common month for that kind of voyage. So
(20:35):
all of it can be explained away kind of um,
but it is definitely something you look at go oh interesting,
It is interesting, and it's amazing coincidence, and it focuses
the attention and captures the imagination. Um. But then yeah,
once you hear about Robertson's background, it becomes slightly less impressive.
So then kind of too over the years that little
(20:57):
Colonel got erased and added to it was that this
idea for this book came to him in a trance,
which bolsters the espy Is that true or is that
just been added? Uh, I'm sure it was added over
the years. Which is a big problem with this kind
of anecdotal evidence is that you know, it gets embellished
in that. Yeah, exactly. And uh, it's just it's not
(21:20):
enough that this is a really interesting, unique circumstance or
coincidence or whatever. There has to be this extra layer
of proof, like it came to him in a trance.
Come on. Yeah. Um. So back to Rhyan, he did
some um. Like I said, in the nineteen thirties, he
started studying the stuff with one of my favorite inventions,
(21:43):
um by his colleague Carl Zenter. Of course, if you
seen Ghostbusters he was using. He was using a version
of Zentner cards. Um. The shapes weren't all exactly. I
think there was one that was different Um and Ghostbusters,
But the original Zentner cards were was a deck of
twenty five Plaine white cards, with each of them had
(22:03):
one of five symbols, a circle plus sign, a square,
a star, five point star and the three wavy lines
like water a river. So what that is? Okay? And
the idea is that, just like in Ghostbusters, you hold
it up and UM asked the you know, not showing
(22:24):
them the card at obviously not the symbol, and say
what do you see? And they say what they see?
And then you record after the deck how many they got? Right? Right,
But the person holding the card is supposed to be
thinking about what they're seeing so that the other person,
the target, the receiver, can pick it up tele telepathically. Yeah,
(22:46):
and I did they have these online? I took the
test yesterday, UM, and I went through the deck and
I only got six out of and at the end
it just said you are not a psychic. Really, Yeah,
that was kind of funny. Statistically speaking for just one trial,
that is more than chance. You did better than chance,
So maybe you do have a touch six of what
(23:08):
what would chance to be a chance would be if
there's five different ones, and so this was six of
twenty four would be uh no, that's not no, that's less. Yeah, No,
you did six of you did, so five of five
(23:28):
would be chance. Okay, so I got one more? Yeah? Well,
and I think like three of the first eight or
so or six I got, and I was like, I've
got the gift, right, but I didn't know, like it's
randomly generated, and so it's not like someone was on
the other side thinking of that card. So I literally
I was like, what do I do? I was like,
I'm just guessing. So that brings up some interesting stuff,
(23:51):
like there's there's um evidence that when a machine is
involved that there is no telepathy. There would only be clairvoyance. Right,
So I mean if if if telepathy is you picking
up what's in someone else's mind and the computer is mindless,
then you shouldn't be able what you were saying, like
(24:12):
you should it shouldn't You should not be able to
know what zenter card it's going to pick next. Right,
But there have been investigations using computers and using machines
that show above chance that there is some sort of
weird interaction like a random number generators. So Princeton University
has a department called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Department.
(24:36):
Pair right and pair has been doing studies for a
couple of decades. The millions of trials and basically they'll
say this is a random number generator or this this
machine operates randomly or whatever. We want you to think
of a number, and we want to see if you
can influence the numbers that this computer spits out. Oh
(24:56):
so you're thinking of the number, then you're okay. The
human is trying to affect the computer, the output the
behavior of the computer. Of course, if you're sitting across
the room or in another room thinking about a number
that a random generator should put out, it should have
zero effect whatsoever. It's a computer. The weird thing is
(25:16):
is what Princeton has found is that yes, over enough trials,
you there is a slight, very slight, but measurable effect
that human thought has on a random number generator. It's
it's on Princeton's website. And this is stuff that like
is apparently accepted in the in the scientific community that
the the the trials that they are running are so
(25:41):
widespread and so repeatable and have been done so many
times that the data that they're coming up with is
is it's significant. Well, Ryan, with his inner card experiments
in the thirties did find that some people um got
what they thought were pretty impressive results. It's like, you know,
a few I can't remember their names, but Hubert Pierce
(26:03):
was he one of them. He was the one how
many what was his percentage? He had one where he got, um,
remember how you got three in a row and you're like,
oh my god, he got twenty five in a row once.
Come on, no, I'm not kidding. He was also documented
iss selecting five hundred and fifty eight correct out of
eight hundred and fifty which is the odds of that
(26:26):
happening by chance, We're twenty two billion to one. Now,
were these the early experiments? Because okay, because I did
read that UM and this seems like I can't believe
he didn't check this. Apparently the early cards were a
little translucent. Oh yeah, some of them were. And then
he corrected for that and the and the percentages went
(26:47):
down and then they U I know other scientists said
that you are somehow influencing with your body. Tell like
you basically you don't have a good enough poker face. Yeah,
And the earliest um Ryan experiments with the center cards,
he would hold the card up and he'd be making
eye contact right right the guy. Yeah, the guess it
(27:09):
would be like is it the way line? And yeah,
he start shaking his head almost imperceptive. Um, but he
uh he, that's called sensory leakage, where you the person
who is um holding the card and knows where the
card is somehow, there's some detail about your face that
when you do a thousand trials with somebody, they start
(27:32):
to pick up on and it affects their guests. That
influences their guests. So to um correct for that, to
control for that a sensory leakage in that um, they
they came up with something called the gans Field experiment. Yes,
that's a German gunsfeld Um that means whole field in German.
(27:54):
And that is when they started putting people um, they
would start depriving their other sense is basically, uh, they
would be in a like a dimly lit room with
red lighting and they would have white noise, and they
would have their eyes covered with these uh special glasses
or ping pong balls cut in half like Kermit the fraud.
(28:14):
I guess later on they said, we should just make
some classes exactly We've got the funding. So basically the
idea was, let's rule out any uh any of that
gross censury leakage, which smells um. So yeah, Apparently later
on in Rhyan's experiments. Um, after he started controlling for stuff,
(28:37):
the percentages started to drop. Yeah. Correct, Um, he's he was.
Also he's generally a respected researcher for a couple of reasons. One,
whenever he did whenever evidence of like um, some sort
of bias or fraud or something was brought to him,
he corrected for it. He wore glasses in a white right.
(29:00):
That was another one. Um. But also he was daring
enough to stake his entire career on a field of
study that will get anybody mocked publicly privately. Um, can
really shut down a lot of opportunities for you. This
guy and his wife, Louisa Ryan both dedicated their careers
(29:24):
to establishing the field of parapsychology and really studying it
and then just walking away from it. I don't think
he was like, I really want to prove this is true?
Was he? Uh? Yes, he did? That was that was
a huge criticism of him. He was a definite believer. Um.
He was quoted by I don't know what the guy's
(29:47):
steal was, but one day he was visited by one
person and the interviewer who went on to write a
paper I think in scientific American to expose him. He
said he kept a file of people of the results
of tests where um, people he suspected were purposefully getting
things wrong because they didn't like him to mess with
(30:10):
his data, he just took those and never published him.
He didn't include him in the results, which would definitely
affect the number of correct hits. Right. Um, that was
a huge criticism. That's not good science at all. But
he was definitely a believer, which was another criticism. But
he was daring and he did um. There was another
(30:30):
story where it's called the Levy affair where a guy
named Levy, who was an electrical engineer working in the lab,
unplugged uh, I guess the censor that would correct negative
hits for a little while during a trial, so that
all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits,
um and so, and then he plugged it back in. Well,
(30:52):
this one guy saw what the guy was doing and
went to Ryan. And Ryan went to the guy Levy
and said, did you do this? And let me say,
just it's like you're fired, and just like through the
results away and all that. So he wasn't like he
was a true believer, but he wasn't just some like
outright fraud, right right, But he was and still is
under the microscope as much as probably any researcher in
(31:13):
all of academia ever has been. All right, well, right
after this break, we'll talk a little bit about what
skeptics say about ESP All right, Josh. One thing you'll
(31:38):
hear skeptics say a lot is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And I have to agree with him, and Uh, it
is an extraordinary claim here. And UM, so far there
hasn't been um extraordinary evidence. And one of the things
I pointed to earlier that I think is what's going
on if you look at statistics, you look at six
(31:59):
billion people on planet Earth, uh, and them thinking a
good zillion things each day. And that is scientific, by
the way. Um, at some point somebody is going to
think something that it mirrors something that happens in the
near future. Uh, And it's just chance and coincidence. I
have a great example of that, man. It happened this
(32:21):
very morning. Yeah I did. Um. I was at the printer.
You know, we just moved offices, and I was at
the printer and I had like an extra piece of
paper that I didn't need, and I realized, like, we
have no paper recycling here. So on my way back
yet that is everyone out there. It's like, what kind
of office would have, right, we just said we have
a we have a fifty gallon drum that we throw
(32:42):
stuff into that it catches on fire and then we
send it up a burning drum, that's what it's called.
Now we're getting those soon, um, right, and we are
getting hip soon. I know this because on my way
back to my desk, I popped into Izzy, the I
T guy who's also the head of all recycling and
stuff here. It's like, is he need a paper recycling
bins by the printer? And he goes, I'm writing an
(33:06):
email right now to everybody about that very thing. You
almost did your USY impression close, um, And so like
I thought about it. That's pretty amazing, you know. But
it was about nine in the morning, and this is
a company wide email, so it would be something that
is he would probably knock out about that time. The
(33:27):
reason I was thinking of is because I was just
at the printer. We just moved into this office and
we didn't have bins yet, so it was still a
potential thing for somebody to be thinking about. Or doing
or writing an email about UM. And so there's all
these different really overlooked variables or factors to this whole
thing that that you don't think of. Instead, it just
(33:48):
seems like an amazing coincidence or ESP. To me, the
really significant thing was that I happened to be researching
ESP while this happened. That's what it really kind of
stood out to me. But if you really kind of
look at it, like, there's a finite amount of things
that people could think about in any given day, in
any giving context, in an office or something like that.
(34:09):
Like had I been a goat at a petting zoo
and I went over and UM talked to the cow
and the cow was writing the email about recycling bins. Maybe,
but we're in an office. I'm talking to the guy
about recycling bins. There's just a lot of stuff that
you kind of once you take that into account, it
(34:30):
becomes less amazing. Like like the the guy writing the
Titan Titanic book. Yeah, you know, I used to happen
to me, now that I think of it, is UM.
I used to And this it's weird. It was only
with phone land lines that hadn't happened with the cell phone.
But I used to like, no, the phone was gonna
ring right before it rang, like almost go to reach
for it. Um. And I mean it's not like it
(34:52):
happened all the time, but it happened enough times where
I was like, that's weird. Sure, I know what you're
talking about, but and that was all it was to me.
I was not like I the gift. But think about
it in in that respect to you know people, So
was it you knew who was calling or just that
the phone was about to just that it was about
to ring. Now, yeah, that is weird. You definitely do
have esp yeah, um. Or maybe I don't know, maybe
(35:18):
the phone made a little tick noise right before it
rang that I didn't pick up on, but only subconsciously.
You know. Well that's another explanation for today that um right,
that um there is uh subliminal stuff in the environment
that is just too weak in nature for us to
pick up on consciously, but our unconscious does or subconscious does,
(35:42):
which frankly opens up a whole other can of worms.
You know, as far as you know, how real is
that kind of thing there? But probably a little closer
to reality is the idea that um our attention isn't
focused on everything that we're picking up at all times,
like like I see your beard and I see your
shirt and everything, but I'm still also picking up like
(36:03):
sensory information from like Jerry's computer that I can see
in my peripheral vision or whatever. My attention isn't focused
on it, but my brain is still receiving information. So
the idea that our brains can put it together all
this information that we're not aware consciously that we're receiving, um,
but we're still getting impressions from it. That'sh that that
could be a great explanation for ESP as well. Yeah,
(36:26):
and you know what, now that I think about it,
the fact that it's never happened with my cell phone
sort of makes sense because maybe there it was a
mechanical function a landline, right, Yeah, like you said a
click or a tick, but I think you meant like
a click And it wasn't even the newer model. This
was back in the day when it was like yeah,
ringing like bell, So maybe that does explain it. Yeah,
(36:49):
I've got another good example that I came across and
researching this. UM. Let's say that you and I are
hanging out and you're humming baby, I'm five work right,
just over and over again. I don't know that song,
but I'm reading Yes you do, No, don't, Yeah you do? It?
Was it Katy Perry? I don't know Katy Perry anyway, um,
(37:10):
although I will have to say I did love that
halftime show. It was great, well it was. It was hysterical.
What's up with the sharks being a meme? Now? I
would think they were really significant. She looked like she
was worked at corn Dog on a Stick. I don't
know what that is. That's not all corn dogs around sticks.
It's that place in our hot Dog on a Stick
that was called that place in the mall where they
(37:30):
wore those big giant Yeah. No, I don't know anything
about Katy Perry. But it was the funniest most but
like the crazy just kept coming and coming, and I
was like, this is the best thing I've ever seen.
So anyway, in this universe, you're well aware of Katy
Perry and her song Firework, and you're humming it to yourself.
But I'm sitting there reading The New Yorker and I'm
(37:52):
engrossed in it and not I don't notice that you
get up to go make some nachos, and you come
back in, and you catch my attention because you're you're
coming back in with some nachos and they smell awesome.
And now my attention is directed to you, and you're
still humming Firework, right, And I'm like, I was just
thinking about that song Firework. I had that in my head.
(38:13):
How crazy we must be connected. I didn't realize that
you had been humming it earlier, and beneath my awareness
I picked it up. Although once I became aware that
you were humming it, it seemed to me like I
had ESP. Well, yeah, and that ties into another explanation
is that people who do seem to have that gift
are just really really hyper observant on minute details, like
(38:37):
the same people that can pick up on micro expressions. Um,
they might feel like they have the gift because they're
just really in tune to what's going on around them
or not just you know, like a big lunk head
walking around. So a lot of people who believe in
the ESP say, yes, we agree with that, especially parapsychology researchers,
and there are still plenty of respected ones out there.
(39:00):
Is a guy named darry O Bem. Yeah, I saw
that thing. He said. He's been doing this for a
while now legitimately we should talk about him. But there
to button up that point, there is UM a lot
of parapsychologists or even just plain old psychologists who are
researching ESPUM who say, yes, that definitely most likely accounts
(39:23):
for almost all of it, and that's good for us
to be thinking about that, and that in and of
itself deserves like academic inquiry and research. Right, But there
are still some experience experiments that are being produced by
guys like Darry Obem that UM are showing some weird
results that go beyond this kind of explanation. Yeah. And
(39:44):
and one of the problems, well we'll talk about the
problems with even this research um about it being reproducible
in a second. But he did a couple of experiments.
This is from NPR. Crow wrote this, Yeah, from from
from radio LAMB Nice. I didn't know that, um. These
are the two that he pointed out. He did nine
different experiments, but the two that he highlighted was at Cornell,
(40:08):
which is where bim is a does his work. Right. Yeah,
and he's again a very respected psychologist, and this study
that of these experiments was published in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, which is a respected journal. Yeah, um,
so they The first one was a computer quiz. They
took a hundred students, fifty males and fifty women, and um. Basically,
(40:32):
they showed a computer screen with two little curtains on it,
side by side and said, behind one is nothing a
brick wall, and behind the other is something sexy. Yeah,
some kind of you know, I was about to call
it pornographic, but who knows. Maybe it's art erodess. Yeah, gross, Um,
(40:57):
that just makes you feel like you're dad saying it
or something. Yeah, well, this room too small for you
to say. Um. So basically he would say, you tell me, um,
what what you think you're going to see? And they
were all hooked up to uh two machines to read
the you know, they're what's going on in their body
of course, and um, you would think it would be
a fifty results, but they actually got a fifty three
(41:19):
point one percent result for the what UH craw Witch
calls erotic stimuli. Um. And basically they they think, or
at least that's what BEM thinks, is that one possibility
is that if there's if they think they're going to
see something erotically stimulating, then um, it got passed back
(41:43):
through time. Yeah, that's kind of his position, is that
retrocognition thing. Yeah, that they somehow their future selves who
saw the erotic image was stimulated enough that that stimulation
traveled backwards three seconds and influenced their choice because they
were they would be slightly stimulated physiologically right before they guess.
(42:05):
And he said, before the computer even chose which which
one to show? Right, they right, they were making their
choices often correct, Um, before the computer chose to show
an erotic or non erotic image. And it doesn't sound
like much, but crow which points out a couple of things.
One that um, when there was a control group that
(42:26):
was shown just non erotic pictures, they did forty nine
eight percent correct, which is chance. They're all not happy, right,
They're like, we don't want to be the control They're like,
can we get a little steamier in here? Um? But
and he he also pointed out that fifty three point one,
to be specific, doesn't sound like much, but um, apparently
(42:50):
that's a point two percent chance where on a scale
between zero and one, where zero is it's not going
to happen, and one is that it's definitely gonna happen.
And apparently, as far as um correlation goes, or links
between two things something affecting another, a point too is
(43:12):
about the same as the link between aspirin and heart
attack prevention. Um, the link between calcium and taken bone mass,
the link between second hand smoke and lung cancer. So
things that are touted is like, pay attention to this, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So so stuff that we accepted is like, yeah, yeah,
if you're around second hand smoke you can get cancer
(43:34):
from has the same exactly it is and um. Later on,
a meta analysis of Bem's experiments, some other experiments that
were carried out afterward, and then some other experiments all
grouped together. A meta analysis showed that um, they they weren't.
It wasn't statistically significant if you took all of the
(43:57):
existing body of literature of these experiment but it was
a New Scientist article, and um, it was pretty cool.
In the comments section, somebody said, yeah, it's not reproducible,
but a lot of science isn't reproducible. And it reminded
me of our scientific method episode where like apparently a
lot of um trials that that like pharmaceuticals are based
(44:22):
on aren't reproducible. Wasn't it like them? Which doesn't surprise
me of course. Yeah, all right. And then there was
this other experiment that I need you to explain to
me because I didn't understand it. Okay, you're ready, Like
I got the first part, but I didn't. I didn't.
It didn't make sense to me because it's a little
mind blowing. So you know how like if you are
studying something and you write it down, it gets in
(44:44):
your brain a little more so that when you're tested
on it later, uh, you will recall it more easily. Yeah,
that's a common study method, write something down. So Bem
carried out a very simple experiment that did the opposite
of that. First, he showed some people a bunch of
a bunch of words, forty eight random words. I think
now it's like tree or something like that, and he
(45:06):
told them to visualize it though, right, right, So they
saw all forty eight words and thought about them, not
visualized the letters, but visualized the thing, right, like see
the tree, and just just to kind of try to
memorize all forty eight words. Then the computer randomly selected
twenty four of those words, and then after they'd done that,
BEM gave them a test of recall to see how
(45:29):
many they recalled right. So the people I had to
type out the the the words they recalled. Then after that,
the computer randomly selected twenty four of the forty eight
words for the people to type after they had already
taken the test of recall. And those twenty four words
(45:51):
are the ones that people more consistently got right on
the earlier tests. So it's it's another example of that
retroco mission that these people getting the words in their
heads after the tests somehow went backward and influenced their
recall and memory for the test that they took before
(46:11):
they learned them. That makes more sense a little, Yeah,
it is a little let's see, time travel melts my
brain too, right. So this guy published this stuff in
like two thousand and ten, and like it was, it
made a huge, huge splash, huge criticism. The academic journal
was criticized, and Ben was you know, pilloried and all that.
(46:31):
But he's still you know, put out these these very reproducible, understandable,
simple exercises that still showed statistically speaking, there were some
significant results that went beyond chance. So when it comes
to debunking UM esp one thing that you're not gonna
you know, you said fraud, You're not gonna see a
(46:51):
lot of people call researchers outright frauds because that's just
sort of a dangerous thing to say. Sure, it's not nice, um,
but there are people out there who I guess or
criticized for, you know, basically trying to call out UM.
And this is something completely different. But these these on
stage psychic shows like crossing Over with John Edwards, Yeah,
(47:14):
like it's easy to pick those people out and say
you're a big fraud and this is not true of course,
And all you're doing is cold reading. Uh cold reading
we talked about in the Animal Um Pet Psychics episode.
That's basically when you get up on stage and you say, sir,
I'm sensing um someone there you're having some trouble with
with another man in your life. Uh with the name
(47:39):
of j or or is it h or oh, or
maybe it's p Yes, p my my boss, Uh Peter, Yes,
yes exactly. And that's all a cold reading is. It's
throwing out these really broad things that anyone can latch onto.
So it's really easy to call uh, those people out.
And there's a guy, um sort of a guy famous
for doing that. His name is um James Randy, and
(48:02):
he's famous for his offer of one million dollars to
anyone that can prove their psychic ability, which of course
no one stepped up to do that. But then he
gets pooh pooed a little bit, like you're just making
a mockery of trying to legitimately disprove something. And mockery
is absolutely the right word. And to me, the presence
(48:23):
of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity, right, So, like
what you're dealing with then with a guy like that,
is uh, a set of beliefs, a belief system running
up against another belief system, just like a couple of
religions or something like that. It's not objectivity against fraud
or anything like that. It's belief against belief or something.
(48:46):
Um And and yeah, the idea of lumping together John
Edwards with Darryl bem is just that's, you know, fraudulent
in and of itself. Yeah, that's just they call that theatrics,
just like the on stage h theatrics of a stage psychic. Yeah,
so I believe. I totally agree. Yeah, you know I
I do too. I think there's a definite room for
(49:09):
a healthy scientific inquiry into just about anything, whether skeptics
believe in it or not. If you can get some
funding for it, who cares. That's my motto. You got
anything else on ESP? Uh? Let me think? No, I've
got one more thing I found. I came across the
(49:31):
I think five Nightline with Ted Coppele, where, Um, the
news broke that the CIA had been studying ESP and
trying to do remote viewing what Ronson was talking about
in The Men Who Stare at Coats when it finally
became declassified. In take, coppled like a twenty minute Nightline
segment on it totally worth watching. It's some pretty softball questions.
(49:55):
But Robert Gates, who would later become the the head
of Defense, he's on there just basically trying as politely
as possible to show that he does not believe in
any of this. Even so, here's the pharmacy. I a director,
and um, it's just neat. Unlus you get to watch
Copple again. I miss he was great news man. Yeah,
I miss those dudes. I miss. Uh, I was just
(50:17):
thinking yesterday about broke call. Yeah, rather I was. I
was always a broke coll man. Did you I like
Peter Jennings He was great? Yeah. I don't even all
of them were great. I don't even have any idea
who does Night in the News now I don't watch it.
It was Brian Williams until about a day ago. Did
he get fired? He like got I know, the whole kerfuffle,
(50:37):
but he didn't get fired. I'm using my ESP to
predict that by the time this came, this comes out,
he will not be there anymore. I think this is
getting big quick interesting. Yeah, Twitter is involved, man, the
Twitter takedown. Uh. If you want them more about ESP,
the internet was virtually set up for you to go
(51:00):
find out more about it. Um, you can start by
typing ESP in the search far at how stuff works
dot com. Since I said that it's time for a
listener mail, yeah, before we do listener mail, I just
want to give a quick shout out to my buddy
Isaac McNairy. Uh. If you remember, I did a Judge
John Hodgman episode with Emily in which I did a
bad home renovation and um, this dude stuff you should know.
(51:23):
Listener from Kansas carpenter. Master carpenter said, hey, man, I'll
come and stay with you and help you do your
your project. They're right, And I said this sounds crazy,
and he actually came and did it and it looks
awesome and he's a super cool guy. And if you're
in Kansas near Elder Rado, Kansas, there's no better guy
(51:43):
to hire of El Dorado, it's Elder Rado. Actually, Okay,
he has a point out, but um, not only is
he a great carpenter and a cool guy, but he
works with a nonprofit called Outreach Program. Uh and you
can find an outreach program dot org where they're basically
feeding the world. They package food and they get people
together in a room and package these mass quantities of
(52:06):
food to send to other countries and feed the hungry.
And he's just a really good dude. So thanks to
Isaac for that, and my kitchen was looking good. So
again for his nonprofit that is Outreach Program dot org.
And if you need a great carpenter and you're in Kansas,
check out Retrofit Remodeling. All right, listener, mail, I'm gonna
(52:27):
call this pronunciation help. Hey guys, I'm a botanist and
just want to throw throw your rope to help you
out with pronouncing plant family names. All plant family names
end in a C E A E. Oh yeah, I
thought we got that wrong. Uh, it is a mess
of vowels. Guys, when you read it, you should just
imagine you were spelling a C E as in a CE.
(52:53):
So when you read a plant family name, just break
off the CE and read the first part and then
spell a C. So the plant family for poison oak
is uh Ana cardia Anna cardia ce. So it's just
Anna cardi A C. I remember it by imagining the
aneurysm and cardiac arrest I would have if I fell
(53:16):
into it. A N, A C A R D. I
what well she spelled out Anna cardi. Oh got the
first two uh, first letters from each of those words. Anyway,
Guys who love your podcast find it endearing when you too,
puzzle out on pronunciations. Um see see that's good to know. Yeah,
so I love you, bunches, And that is from Jane
(53:38):
and she said ps. In Europe, they pronounced plant families
completely differently. Um other parts see other parts of the
US might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is
standard in California. Well, okay, what a c C. I
(54:00):
You want to let us know something that we should
have known before we even recorded, But you're generous enough
with your time and effort to correct us. I guess
there's a way to put it. We that was very helpful.
Thanks a lot, Jane. If you want to be like
Jane in other words, you can tweet to us at
s Y s K podcast. You can join us on
Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can
(54:21):
send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff
works dot com, and as always, you can join us
at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
is it how stuff Works dot com
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