Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there (2 page)

Field footage of Jaytee test

http://www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/Jaytee.html

In 1967, psychologist husband and wife team, Loren and Jean Chapman, from the University of Wisconsin, conducted a now classic experiment
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The study involved a form of psychiatric assessment that was popular in the 1960s called the ‘Draw A Person Test’. According to clinicians at the time, it was possible to detect all sorts of possible problems, such as paranoia, repressed sexuality and depression from an individual’s drawing of a typical person. The Chapmans, however, were not so sure that the test stood up to scrutiny. After all, many of the alleged relationships, such as paranoid people making drawings with large eyes, seemed to fit surprisingly well with the stereotypes that the public carry around in their heads, and so the Chapmans wondered whether the alleged patterns were actually in the minds of the clinicians. To test their idea, a group of students were presented with drawings of people made by psychiatric patients, along with a brief description of their symptoms, such as ‘He is suspicious’, ‘He is worried about not being manly enough’, ‘He is worried about sexual impotence’. After looking through the pairings of pictures and words, the volunteers were asked whether they had noticed any patterns in the data. Interestingly, the volunteers reported the same types of patterns that professionals had been using for years. They thought, for example, that paranoid people draw atypical eyes, those with issues surrounding their manliness produced broad-shouldered figures and that small sexual organs were indicative of impotence-related matters.
 

There was just one small problem. The Chapmans had randomly paired up the drawing and symptoms, so there were no real patterns in the data. The volunteers had seen the invisible. The Chapmans’ work completely discredited the ‘Draw A Person Test’ and, more importantly, revealed an important insight into the human psyche. Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information. Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world. This is especially true when faced with coincidences. We are remarkably good at paying attention to events that coincide, especially when they support our beliefs. In the Chapmans’ experiment, volunteers already believed that paranoid people would produce drawings with large eyes, and so noticed instances when a paranoid person’s drawing actually had large eyes and played down the images from paranoid individuals that had perfectly normal eyes.

The same principle applies to matters of the paranormal. We all like to think that we have untapped psychic potential and get excited when we think of a friend, the telephone rings, and they’re on the other end of the line. In doing so, we are forgetting all the occasions when we thought about that friend, the telephone rang, and it was a double-glazing salesman. Or all the times you weren’t thinking about the friend and they unexpectedly telephoned. Similarly, if we have a dream that reflects the following day’s events, we are quick to claim the gift of prophesy, but in doing so we are ignoring all of the times when our dreams didn’t come true. It is the same with animal magic. If we believe that owners have a psychic bond with their pets, we pay attention to when an animal seems to predict their owner’s homecoming, and forget when the animal made a prediction but was wrong, or failed to foresee a return.

Perhaps more importantly, the same mechanism also leads us astray with health. In the mid-1990s researchers Donald Redelmeier and Amos Tversky decided to investigate the possible link between arthritic pain and the weather
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For thousands of years people have convinced themselves that their arthritis flares up with certain changes in temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity. To find out if this was really the case, Redelmeier and Tversky had a group of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers rate their pain levels twice a month for over a year. The research team then obtained detailed information about the local temperature, barometric pressure and humidity over the same time period. All of the patients were convinced that there was a relationship between the weather and their pain. However, the data showed that their condition was completely unrelated to the weather patterns. Once again, they had focused on the times when high levels of pain were associated with especially odd weather patterns, forgotten about the times when this was not the case, and erroneously concluded that the two were related.

Similarly, we might hear about someone who was miraculously healed after praying, forget about those who were healed without prayer or prayed but were not healed, and incorrectly conclude that prayer works. Or we might read about someone who was cured of cancer after eating lots of oranges, forget those who were cured without oranges or consumed oranges but weren’t cured, and end up believing that oranges help cure cancer.
 

The effect can even play a role in promoting racism, with people seeing images of those from ethnic minorities engaged in acts of violence, forgetting about the individuals from minorities who are law-abiding citizens and the violent people from non-minority backgrounds, and concluding that those from minorities are especially likely to commit crime.
 

My research into Jaytee started off with an investigation into a supposedly psychic dog and ended up revealing a great deal about one of the most fundamental ways in which we misperceive the world. This illustrates why I find supernatural science so fascinating. Each journey takes you on a voyage into the unknown where you have no idea who you are going to meet or what you are going to find.
 

We are about to embark on an expedition deep into this hitherto hidden world of supernatural science. In a series of fantastical tales, we will meet a colourful cast of characters, go backstage with expert illusionists, observe charismatic cult leaders in action, and attend mindboggling séances.
Each adventure will reveal unique and surprising insights into the hidden psychology behind your everyday life
, including, for example, how
you have evolved to be afraid of things that go bump in the night, how your unconscious is far more powerful than previously imagined, and how your mind can be controlled by others.
The journey is going to be far more than a passive sightseeing trip. Along the way you will be urged to roll up your sleeves and take part in several experiments. Each of these tests offers an opportunity to explore the more mysterious side of your psyche, encouraging you, for example, to measure your powers of intuition, assess how suggestible you are, and discover if you are a natural-born liar.
 

It is almost time to depart. Prepare to enter a world where anything appears possible and yet nothing is ever quite what it seems. A world where the truth really is stranger than fiction. A world that I have had the pleasure of calling home for the past twenty years.
 

Hurry now, there’s a storm brewing, and we are about to begin our journey into a world far more wonderful than Oz . . .
 

1. FORTUNE-TELLING 

In which we meet the mysterious ‘Mr D’, visit the non-existent town of Lake Wobegon, find out how to convince strangers that we know all about them and discover who we really are.

For reasons that will soon become apparent, it wouldn’t be fair to give Mr D’s real name. Born in the North of England in 1934, this remarkable man spent much of his life working as a professional psychic and developed a considerable reputation for highly accurate readings. When I was studying at Edinburgh University, Mr D contacted me and asked whether I would be interested in watching him give some readings. I immediately accepted the kind offer and invited Mr D to the University so that I could film him at work. A few weeks later the two of us met in the foyer of the Psychology Department. I showed him into my laboratory and explained that I had lined up several volunteers who were eager to take part in a psychic reading. Mr D quietly set up his table, took out his Tarot cards and crystal ball, and waited for his first guinea pig. A few moments later the door opened and in walked a 43-year-old barmaid named Lisa. I pressed the ‘record’ button on the video camera and retreated to the other side of a two-way mirror.
 

Mr D knew nothing about Lisa before the reading. He started by asking her to hold out her right hand, palm up. After carefully examining her palm with a horn-handled magnifying glass, Mr D started to describe her personality. Within seconds Lisa was nodding and smiling. He next asked her to shuffle a deck of Tarot cards and then place them in the centre of the table. Mr D turned over one card after another and spoke about each in turn. Within a few minutes he told Lisa that she had a brother and described his career in considerable detail. A few moments later Mr D said that he thought Lisa had recently broken up from a long-term relationship.
 

Lisa’s reading lasted around ten minutes. When she left the laboratory I interviewed her about what she thought about her time with Mr D. Lisa was extremely impressed, and explained how Mr D had been correct about her personality, recent relationship difficulties and brother’s career. When I asked Lisa to rate the accuracy of Mr D’s reading she gave it top marks.
 

Throughout the morning several other people came away equally convinced that Mr D possessed uncanny powers. After a spot of lunch, Mr D watched the recordings of his readings and explained more about his abilities. It proved a fascinating and eye-opening experience. In just a few hours Mr D not only provided a rare glimpse into the world of the professional psychic, but also revealed how almost anyone could learn to develop such powers. At the end of the day Mr D packed away his Tarot cards and said goodbye. Unfortunately, I never met Mr D again because he suffered a sudden and fatal heart attack a few years later. However, the day that I spent with him lives on in my mind, and we will return to the secret behind his seemingly magical gift of insight later in the chapter.

Every year millions of people visit psychics and come away completely convinced that these individuals have the ability to see deep within their souls. Are they kidding themselves, the victims of elaborate scams, or is something genuinely spooky going on? To find out, a small number of researchers have put the alleged paranormal powers of psychics and mediums under the microscope, of whom the most notable investigator is magician and arch-sceptic, James Randi.
 

Laboratory footage of Mr D at work

http://www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/MrD.html

Séance on a Warm Wednesday Afternoon

Randall James Hamilton Zwinge was born in Toronto in 1928
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When he was 12 years old, he happened to catch a matinee performance by a well-known American magician named Harry Blackstone Sr. The bug bit deep, and Zwinge found out as much as he could about the secretive world of magic and eventually started to perform on a regular basis.
 

Like many magicians, Zwinge was a tad sceptical about matters paranormal. When he was 15 he went along to his local spiritualist church and was disgusted by what he witnessed. People in the congregation were encouraged to bring along sealed envelopes containing questions to their deceased loved ones. The ministers then
secretly read the messages
and created a fake reply from the ‘dead’. Zwinge attempted to expose the deception, but upset the ministers and ended up spending time at the local police station.
 

Unperturbed, he eventually grew a goatee, legally changed his name to James ‘The Amazing’ Randi, and embarked on a long and colourful career as a professional magician and escapologist. Over the years Randi has been involved in a series of headline-grabbing projects, including remaining in a sealed metal coffin for 104 minutes (breaking Houdini’s record by just over ten minutes), clocking up 22 appearances on Johnny Carson’s
The Tonight Show
, featuring in an episode of
Happy Days
, escaping from a straitjacket while hanging upside-down over Niagara Falls, and appearing to behead rock legend Alice Cooper on a nightly basis.
 

In tandem with his magic career, Randi continued his crusade against paranormal chicanery. His investigations gained such momentum and notoriety that
in 1996
he established
the James Randi Educational Foundation. The website promotes itself as ‘an educational resource on the paranormal, pseudoscientific and the supernatural’ and it also offers a bold challenge to would-be psychics or those professing to have paranormal powers. A million dollar challenge to be precise.

In the late 1960s Randi appeared on a radio chat show explaining why he thought that those claiming paranormal powers were either deluding themselves or deceiving others.
One panellist, a parapsychologist,
suggested that he put his money where his mouth was by offering a cash prize to anyone who could show that they had genuine psychic abilities. Randi took up the challenge and put up $1,000. Over the years Randi’s offer grew to $100,000 and then, in the late 1990s,
a wealthy supporter of his Foundation
increased the prize fund to one million dollars to anyone who can demonstrate the existence of paranormal abilities to the satisfaction
of an independent panel
(so far, no one has). But for over a decade this opportunity to become an instant millionaire has attracted a steady stream of applicants, including psychics who claim to be able to guess the order of shuffled decks of cards, dowsers who say they can use bent coat hangers
and forked sticks
to discover underground water, and even a woman who tried to use the power of her mind to make strangers urinate.
That, too, was a failure.
 
In 2008 a British medium called Patricia Putt applied for Randi’s million-dollar challenge. Putt was convinced that she was able to garner information about the living by chatting with their deceased friends and relatives. Randi asked me and Chris French, a Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths College in London, to test Putt’s abilities
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