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Hello, I'm Alex Hughes, and this is the Instant Genius Podcast, a bite-sized masterclass from the BBC Science Focus magazine. Have you ever seen a bright light in the sky and felt your mind jump to a UFO? Or maybe you've seen a ghostly figure in your house. If you're one of an incredibly rare group, you might have experienced memories of a past life or successfully predicted a major event that later occurred. These are all examples of the weird and wonderful world of the paranormal.
ghosts, tarot cards, the ability to move things with your mind. These are all topics that we spend our lives questioning, but how can you explain them? We spoke to Chris French to better understand these experiences. He's the head of the Animalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths University of London and the author of the new book, The Science of Weird Shitty.
Well, you can guess where that was going. He breaks down the science behind the paranormal world, explaining why we feel, think and believe in these mysterious occurrences. So near-death experiences, tarot cards, vampires, Ouija boards, the ability to talk to the dead, alien abductions, ghosts, these are just...
a few of the things you list as examples of what we consider to be paranormal in your book. And that doesn't even begin to cover the full list. When we talk about the idea of paranormal, what actually is it? It's one of those words which kind of everybody knows what it means, but when you try and actually come up with a precise definition that everybody would sign up to, things get a little bit more tricksy. And I think one important distinction to make is between...
how parapsychologists would define the paranormal. Parapsychologists typically limit their areas of interest to three main areas. That's extrasensory perception, which can be... subdivided into telepathy, alleged ability to read minds. Clairvoyance, the alleged ability to pick up information from remote locations without using the known sensory channels. precognition the alleged ability to know about future events before they happen.
Also, another main area for them is psychokinesis, the alleged ability to influence the outside world with just the power of the mind. So if you could make objects levitate with the power of your mind, that would be an example. And finally, evidence related. possibility of life after death.
But they would kind of say they are the core areas. That's their definition of things that are paranormal. They're the examples they would give. Anomalistic psychologists and the media tend to have a much wider definition, which is pretty much anything weird.
So that would include things like alien abduction, which wouldn't necessarily fit the stricter definition. It would include things like the Bermuda Triangle. It would include things like astrology. There's a much, much wider range of things that would fit into that wider definition. Now, I think as long as it's clear what you mean.
when you're talking about it, then I think that's fair on any kind of readers that you've got or any listeners to podcasts and so on. My best attempt, the kind of working definition, again, it's not perfect, but I would go for something like alleged phenomena. that cannot be explained in terms of currently accepted scientific concepts. I think that does a pretty good job.
And you mentioned at the start the group of ideas that are, I guess, more deemed within the academia sense. What is it that separates these from, I guess, all of these other areas, you know, like Bermuda Triangle or these other? things that would be seen as paranormal to a lot of people? That's a very good question. I think it probably dates back to the kind of history of psychical research.
People have always been around who claim to have these abilities and who've had these weird experiences and so on and so forth. But we can kind of, I suppose, pretty much date the modern, more scientific approach to back in 1882 when the Society for Psychical Research.
was set up in London. A few years later, the American Society for Psychical Research. And this was set up by kind of leading thinkers of the day. One of the reasons... that people wanted to try to apply science to these kinds of issues was because there was a great interest in mediumship back in the day, the alleged ability that some people claimed they could talk to the dead or they could...
bring spirits into the room to move objects around and so on and so forth. And some scientists were kind of intrigued by this notion. Also, you should recall that this was not long after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. And the clear implication of that book seemed to be that, well, maybe we were not God's special creation. We didn't have an immortal soul. And there were some people who wanted to try and...
investigate that question from a scientific point of view. So back in the early days, that was the kind of why... evidence relating to life after death was included in there. The inclusion of these alleged abilities like psychokinesis and telepathy and so on, I couldn't give you a kind of clear answer on why that also became the kind of main focus of... research. I can tell you why myself as a normalistic psychologist have a kind of wider definition, and that would be because...
very often it seems to me to be the same kind of psychological processes that are involved in some things that do fit the definition and some very similar things that don't. So to give you one example. If you go for a reading with a medium, this is somebody who claims they're picking up information from the spirits of the dead, well, that very much would fit that stricter definition. If you go for a reading with an astrologer,
they'll claim that they're basing their reading on completely different principles that wouldn't fit that strict definition. But the actual readings at the end of the day would be quite similar. They'd be trying to tell you things about your past, your current situation, your future, and so on and so forth.
the underlying psychological mechanisms would be the same in both cases so it seems silly to me to say well i'll study mediumship but i won't be interested in astrological readings i'm interested in both and What makes someone more perceptive to these ideas of the paranormal? Because, I mean, in your book, you talk about this idea of the Australian sheep goat scale, which is, I guess, a way of measuring someone's belief in the paranormal.
Is there certain personalities that tend to score higher or is it something that's happened to you in your life? There's all sorts of different factors and there's no kind of one simple answer there. I mean, the Australian Sheep-Goat Scale, as it's called, is one very commonly used measure as a questionnaire to measure levels of belief in the paranormal and very much focuses on that kind of stricter definition.
that I gave you earlier. The strange name that it has is because of a biblical reference. The sheep are the believers and the goats are the skeptics. So, you know, you can either score very highly as a believer or you can get a very low score. It means you're very much a skeptic.
It turns out that there are lots of different personality variables that do show some correlation with the tendency to believe in the paranormal and to report having paranormal experiences. That would include things like fantasy...
For example, if you're someone with a very, very vivid imagination, often very, very creative people. There's another personality dimension called absorption. Are you the kind of person who, if you're watching a film or reading a book, you become totally absorbed in it? Hypnotic susceptible.
There's a whole range of these different kind of personality type variables that do correlate. I think the important point to make is that we're talking about at the group level here. So you'll get some people who might score very low on all these things and still be very strong believers in the paranormal.
Other people who'd score very high and would be very, very skeptical. But if you take a group of believers and a group of skeptics and compare them, you will find differences on these kinds of measures. There's also a whole host of... cognitive biases. These are biases in the way that we process information that can be relevant as to why people might believe that they've had some kind of paranormal experience when maybe there are...
more plausible alternative explanations. Again, I'll just give you one example here with a very long list. We're all very, very poor intuitive statisticians. In other words, when it comes to estimating probabilities, we're not very good at it. And particularly...
probabilities in everyday life so in some situations something that might happen that a skeptic would say well maybe that was just a coincidence you know you had a dream a few nights back about a friend that you'd not seen for many many years and suddenly you bump into them in the shopping centre. Now, was that some kind of psychic glimpse into the future or was it just a coincidence? Well, we typically don't like coincidence as an explanation, but when you start and think about it...
coincidence will account for a huge number of these kinds of occurrences. These kinds of coincidences, even very, very unlikely ones, are bound to happen by what mathematicians would call the law of very large numbers. It's inevitable that these things are going to happen. person it happens to you tend to be kind of not think that coincidence is a very good explanation so cognitive biases like that are also relevant and you spoke
a little bit about the biblical sense of being a believer or not. Historically, there was things that science at the time couldn't explain. And, you know, it was put to God or to religion. A tsunami, for example, is an act of God or so is a plague. Is there a sense that paranormal beliefs are similar to this, that, you know, we put these freaky events down to the paranormal because we can't explain them?
I think there's a lot of truth in that. It's certainly the case that what I would see has been all forms of magical thinking. And for me as an atheist, I would include religious beliefs in this, but also paranormal beliefs, traditional superstitions, even belief. and wild, unfounded conspiracy theories. There's a whole range of different things that for me would come under that general umbrella term of magical thinking.
And we know that that type of thinking tends to increase at times of uncertainty and stress, which is very relevant to the kind of period we're living through at the moment. Obviously, we've got things happening on the international scene with what's happening in Ghana. or what's happening in Ukraine. We've gone through Brexit. We've had COVID. I've never known a time in my life when things have been so stressful and so uncertain. And we can see this in the way that people often react.
People turn to things that they feel offer some kind of an explanation for what's going on. Now, in the case of past eras... when everybody was much more religious than they tend to be these days, then obviously if the crops failed, well, that was God punishing us for something. If there was a tsunami, again, similar kinds of arguments.
These days, we might explain these things in different ways. But some of these kinds of beliefs as well give people at least the illusion of control. If someone's going through a lot of problems in their personal life, they might go for a reading with an astrologer, for example. There are a couple of things that's going on there. First of all, it's trying to help them to make sense of it. Sometimes people go to see an astrologer.
because they just want permission to do something that they know is the right thing to do anyway. Get out of that job. It's not good for you. End that relationship. Find somebody else. It's an unhealthy relationship, et cetera, et cetera. And having... an astrologer do a reading where very often they'll say things like, and this goes for psychics as well, and see if things are very rough at the moment, but.
in six months time, things are going to be a lot better. It gives them that confidence to take that step. And it might actually be a good thing for them overall to take that advice and do it. But that notion that maybe we've got a little bit more control over our lives, even if that kind of... sense of control is sometimes illusory it might be psychologically beneficial so you're saying is the world is so crazy right now that
we need the paranormal beliefs to make us feel comfortable. I would tend to personally not to opt for the paranormal beliefs, but I can see why people do. I think particularly when you've got really, really, I mean, a lot of paranormal beliefs to my eyes are not. that dangerous. I think there's some skeptics, and I think I went through a phase of this myself when I first discovered the joys of skepticism. You see all paranormal beliefs as being very dangerous, damaging things.
I acknowledge that there are some benefits from holding some paranormal beliefs. The most obvious one, I suppose, is any kind of evidence for life after death. might in many cases reduce someone's fear of death. I mean, we all fear our own mortality and maybe even more so the death of our loved ones. You know, knowing that they die, we'll never hear from them again. That's it. You know, that's a very distressing.
It's not one that most of us like. So any kind of evidence, even if on the surface it might seem kind of negative, scary evidence like ghosts, but any kind of evidence for the possibility of life after death, we tend to kind of be drawn to it. I mean, you look back to...
the height of the kind of seance era. And some of the tricks that were used by the mediums to modernize, we wouldn't be fooled by that. Well, maybe we would, maybe we wouldn't. But the point is people want to believe. And when people want to believe, they're not going to examine the evidence.
too carefully. The most pervasive cognitive bias that we all suffer from, believers, skeptics, everybody, is called confirmation bias. And that's the tendency that we all have to pay more attention to, to put greater weight on evidence. that supports
either what we already believe or what we want to be true. And we find reasons to dismiss evidence that seems to contradict our beliefs or what we'd like to be true. And we all do this. Now we can try and guard against it by being aware of it and basing our views on...
the best available evidence from well-controlled scientific studies, but none of us are immune to it. And you're saying, obviously, when people approach death, there's, I guess, a comfort in thinking about life after death or what can happen to you. There's also, I guess, this bit in between death and life where people have spoken about these near-death experiences.
float out of their body and they see themselves on a surgery table or they see a light at the end of the tunnel or all of their memories come flooding back to them. Is this a similar sort of thing that it's just a comfort in those moments of fear? I think it's more than that. I think it kind of reinforces it's another source of evidence for the possibility of life after death. Certainly people who've had a near-death experience will more often than not...
report a reduced fear of dying. Now, there are some exceptions to that. I mean, when people first started paying attention to near-death experiences, the focus was all on the more typical ones, which are very positive experiences. But then people noticed that there were
were sometimes negative near-death experiences. I've kind of described them because they're quite interesting. There's three different types. One, basically, in terms of what's happening or what the person feels is happening, for me, I think we're looking at a rich hallucinatory experience. It's a hallucination, but it feels incredibly real feels more real than anything else you've ever experienced Now the first category would be those where what is happening is the same
as what happens during the positive experiences. It's just that the person doesn't like it. You know, they kind of feel they're having an out-of-body experience. They can see themselves on an operating table and they think, oh my God, I'm dying. And they don't like the idea. So that's the first category. The second category is a weird one. It's almost like a Hieronymus Bosch-type vision of hell.
with genuinely with demons and people being roasted over fires and demons with pitchforks and so on. Sounds ludicrous. And people say that even when it's happening, they think it's ludicrous, but it's terrifying as well, you know. And the final type is the one that I find the most.
frightening is people reporting that they just find themselves in this complete void. There's no sound, there's no colour, there's no nothing and you're on your own and you know you're going to be there for all of eternity. And that's the one that sends a real shiver down my spine. Now, I should emphasize the vast majority of near-death experiences are much more positive experiences. Those negative experiences lead to an increased fear of death. The positive ones lead to reduced fear of death.
People typically are much less materialistic when they come out of it. They're much more caring. They're much nicer people, you know. But in terms of what's going on, there are two kind of main approaches. One is that... A near-death experience is exactly what it appears to be to the person who's having it. In other words, it's evidence that, at the very least, consciousness can become separated from the physical brain, which most neuroscientists would not accept.
And secondly, maybe it's a glimpse of life after death. Now, that's one version. The other version, the one favored by most neuropsychologists, is that it's summarized as kind of... visions within a dying brain. There's weird stuff happening in your brain, usually in these circumstances. And this is how basically it's experienced. This is how it's processed. So it feels incredibly real. Now, I wouldn't say that we have...
a definitive non-paranormal explanation for near-death experiences. But if I had to bet money on which I think is the most likely explanation. I would go for the hallucinatory version. One thing to say is that these experiences can even happen when the person is not dying. They just believe that they are dying. So that's kind of quite interesting as well. So, yeah, we need to really flesh.
out the full explanation of what's going on for all these different components of the near-death experience. But I think the neuropsychological approach I think is a more promising and importantly a more testable approach. This might be a horrible grouping of these ideas, and you might tell me that I've misunderstood it, but a lot of the experiences of, I guess, the paranormal tend to encompass seeing or experience something. So, you know, someone sees a UFO in the sky.
ghostly figure in a dark corridor they feel a touch on the shoulder is there I guess a common connection between these kind of experiences where they feel or think they've seen something I think in one sense, yes. I mean, the way that we just interact with the world around us on an everyday... basis, there are two types of information that we've got there. We've got the bottom-up information coming in from the senses all the time, your eyes, your ears, your sense of touch, and so on.
Sometimes that information is either degraded or it's inherently ambiguous. And so we also make use of what's called top-down processing. That's what you already know about the world, your belief, your expectations, and so on.
under certain conditions, I mean, particularly if the information that's coming in from the senses is inherently ambiguous or degraded, then there's a greater influence from the top down. You know, what you expect, what you believe about the way the world is, will influence what... you actually perceive and what you remember. The idea is that we've got a kind of mental model of the world.
and our place in it, and we're constantly updating that on the basis of new incoming information. But sometimes, because it's top-down processing, we can end up seeing things, hearing things, feeling things that aren't really there.
One of the examples that people point to is what's called pareidolia, which is the tendency we often have to just see faces or forms in what's essentially visual randomness. I mean, everyday examples would be... looking up and seeing the faces in the clouds or in the shape of a stain on the floor or the pattern on the wallpaper and so on and so forth.
Now, most of the time, for most of us, we just say, oh, look, you see a face there. It's not a big deal. But if it happens to be a face that looks a bit like Jesus and it's in a church, then you might get pilgrims coming from thousands of miles away to see it. So that's kind of one aspect, particularly.
I suppose, in the visual and the auditory realm, where if something's ambiguous, then what we actually perceive and certainly what we subsequently remember and report will be very much influenced by our own expectations and beliefs. I guess a similar sort of vein. There's a lot of people quite commonly who report the experience of sleep paralysis, this experience of, I guess, having these waking nightmares people tend to describe them as. And I'm curious from your perspective what...
that experience is? What is it that's causing that kind of horrible sensation? It can be absolutely terrifying. In its most basic form, it's not really a big deal. It's kind of when you're half awake and half asleep, either just going into sleep or just coming out of sleep. And you realize that you can't move. So it's just a temporary period of paralysis. And typically, it lasts a few seconds. You shake it off. You think, that was a bit weird. And you get on with your day.
But it can be associated with other symptoms that can make it absolutely terrifying. And the most common things that are reported are sometimes people feel a really strong sense of presence. Even if they can't see anyone or hear anyone, they feel as if there's some... thing in the room with them and whatever it is, it doesn't mean them any good at all.
You might also actually get hallucinations. You might see lights moving around the room or dark shadows or monstrous figures that sometimes kind of come and sit astride the sleeper. Again, people often report a sense of pressure on the chest and difficulty breathing, or you might hear voices or footsteps or mechanical sounds. And this all feels incredibly real. It doesn't feel like a dream. We know in broad brushstroke terms what's going on here. When you go through a...
normal night's sleep, you have repeated periods last around about 90 minutes. And within each of those, you go through stage one, stage two, stage three, sleep, your breathing rate changes, your heart rate, your brainwaves, and you come back up out of those. And you're going to what's called REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep.
And that's the phase of sleep which is typically associated with vivid dreams. And when you're in the REM state, the muscles of your body are actually paralysed. In a normal night's sleep, that kind of 90-minute cycle repeats as you go towards the morning.
relatively more REM and less non-REM, but that's fine. In terms of your consciousness, if you like, when you're in the REM state, you are wherever you are in your dream. The idea is that your muscles are paralyzed to stop you acting out the actions of the dream.
during a sleep paralysis episode putting it simply it's as if your brain wakes up but your body doesn't so you can open your eyes that's one of the few parts of your body you can move you can look around you can see you're in your bedroom but you can't move and you've got all this
dream, weird dream imagery coming through into normal waking consciousness. And the result, as I say, can be absolutely terrifying. I get sent lots of first-hand accounts from people. Even though these are people who've decided for themselves that this was an episode of sleep paralysis, it was hallucinatory. It wasn't real. It's still terrifying.
And I think in the world of paranormal, this is one that I've always found somewhat creepy, is these examples of quite often children, but also adults who talk about these past lives and, you know, they'll list off these reels of information. about an experience or they'll talk about real life things that happened. And I'm curious what the thinking is behind that when people talk about these past lives or these experiences that they've lived beforehand.
These are really intriguing cases. I mean, you can subdivide them into two broad categories. There's one where the accounts that people are coming up with are based on hypnotic regression. People believe generally that if you hypnotise someone, you can kind of mentally take them back in time.
You can take them back to their childhood. Some people believe that you can take them back to memories of being born or even life in the womb. Some people go even further than that and claim that you can actually relive past lives, people who believe in reincarnation. We are almost certainly dealing with false memories in those cases. They are not real memories. They might feel very real, but they're not real.
The reasons for saying that are numerous, even in cases where you regress someone back, say, to the age of seven and they appear to be reliving their seventh birthday party. Their voice might change, their mannerisms, their behavior. They're acting very childlike. But if you analyze their behavior...
properly, you realise that they're behaving the way that adults think a seven-year-old would behave, not the way that real seven-year-olds behave. Similarly, we don't think it's possible because the brain is not mature enough to remember memories of being born or certainly not life in the womb. When it comes to the...
apparent past life memories. People typically aren't able to report things that you might expect them to remember. What's the currency of the country that they claim to be living in in that era? Is their country at war? What's the name of the ruler of the country, etc.? And they're really giving the kind of Hollywood version of life in ancient Rome or ancient Egypt or whatever it was, not the historically accurate one.
So I think we're going to be pretty sure that we're dealing with false memories. The more interesting ones from a psychological point of view are the spontaneous cases. And this is where... Maybe from a very young age, it appears that a child might start giving an account of this past life. My own experience of this, I've not done a huge amount of fieldwork, wouldn't claim that I had, but I did take part in a documentary back in 1998, I think. It was on Channel 4.
or where they sent us to Lebanon to investigate the Druze. The Druze are a religious sect where everybody believes in reincarnation, and there are lots of cases of kids who apparently can remember these past lives. On the basis of that, I didn't really know what to expect before I went out there. And I write about this in my book. But when I came back, I was pretty convinced that we'd been dealing with cases of false memories.
Contrary to a lot of the famous cases that people hear about and talk about, we typically found that the cases we looked at, sometimes... A kid might kind of report that they could have had a memory from a past life, but you couldn't even check it out. It was too vague. Sometimes you could check it out and you checked it out and it didn't check out. So they might claim that in their past life, they were married to such and such a person and their kids' names were this.
no that's not right we had one case that we investigated for this documentary where we went to visit the past life family say we think we found the reincarnation they said no no you can't have done we already know who the reincarnation is so you know and even in the couple of cases that were on for the documentary. I mean, one of them was a very appealing kid called Rabir.
who claimed in his past life he had been not only a successful pop singer, but also an international footballer. And my initial reaction was, yeah, right. But then it turned out this guy actually really did exist. He had fans everywhere.
Everywhere. There were newspaper articles, magazine articles, television interviews. There was a huge amount of information available. The mother of the kid was a huge fan of this guy, even before the kid was born. And he couldn't really come up with any memories that were anything that would...
convince you that this was a genuine past life. I think what's happening is that in a culture like that, with very young children, they'll start to say stuff that often doesn't make much sense to their parents. Now, sometimes that might be related to imaginary playmates.
Daughters had an imaginary playmate, you know, come out with this stuff. And there's nothing to worry about. It's quite a natural thing. But in a culture that believes in reincarnation, they may well think, oh, right, this is something about the past life. You know, they'll try to make sense of it and they'll question the case.
And in that way, they'll unintentionally produce false memories. They'll maybe take the kid to the next village and say, do you remember? Did you live in that house? And that's feeding the child's memory. And we know that you can produce false memories with these kinds of manipulations. albeit unintentionally. So I think that's what's going on here. But it's fascinating. And as I say, I might be wrong. I emphasize this all the time. I might be wrong.
You've kind of hinted at it there a little bit, but you've got a long career in this kind of area and you've seen a lot of different things. Have you encountered any, I guess, anecdotal or personal experiences that while it's maybe lacking evidence, it still leaves you with this level of uncertainty about the nature of reality?
Oh, yeah. I mean, people always ask me this, you know, and there are a couple of examples, again, from documentaries, typically, that I've taken part in. I have a kind of, if you like, a little mental box with a question mark on it where I put these cases. That was intriguing. I'm not sure what was going on there. this side of skepticism, but one was an example of a documentary about a child who...
had a spontaneous past life memory. It was a little kid from Glasgow whose mother was very down to earth. She wasn't into reincarnation in a big way, but her kid had started coming out with these things about living on a small Scottish island where the planes had to land. on the beach and so on and so forth. And it turns out this place really does exist. Some of the memories did appear to check out and some didn't. It was an interesting one where at the end of the day, you kind of thought, hmm.
I wonder what was going on there. Another one was a chap who claimed he had precognitive dreams and he was an artist. Name is David Mandel. David Mandel would. have these dreams and because he was an artist he would kind of try and get an image fixed in his mind before he got up and then he'd draw a picture or paint a picture maybe write a few notes on it and then just put it to one side because he didn't know when the events that he dreamt about were going to happen.
And it might be the following week, or it might be 20 years later. He'd be watching the news and think, that's what I dreamt about. So it was a difficult one. We couldn't test it directly. The approach that we took was to say, well, could we find other events in the news archive that we felt were...
either at least as good matches or maybe sometimes even better matches. In other words, were the matches just coincidental? The aftermath of one earthquake looks much the same as the aftermath of another earthquake. But some of his dreams did seem to be more challenging to sceptics than that.
For example, he had two dreams about the Twin Towers collapsing. One, he had a couple of months before it happened. The other one, he had five years before it happened. But spookily enough, it was five years to the day. So, you know, they're kind of intriguing.
these stories and at the end of the day you've got to be humble enough to say well okay i'm still not 100 convinced but they are intriguing thank you for listening to this episode of instant genius That was Chris French on the Science of the Paranormal. The Instant Genius Podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store.