What is Paraspychology with Caroline Watt

to support the study of the paranormal. This led to the creation of the Parapsychology Unit at University of Edinburgh. Dr Watt, who are speaking with today, wrote a letter to the chair of the unit as she joined the Parasychology department upon graduating from the university. Just so you guys know, we are across oceans from each other and my internet shitty, So there are moments that get a little funky but also might just be a ghost. Because we're talking about here we saw today here at Cash

in the Creepies, we have a very special guest. I would like to welcome all the way from Edinburgh professor and Dr Caroline. What you worked hard for those titles. I'm gonna give you both. Oh just call me Caroline. Caroline. Well, I'm so excited to have you here to talk to you. I have like five billion questions and I think just to start off with for our listeners, can you explain

what parapsychology is. So I'm a professor of parapsychology at Edinburg University and parapsychology is a scientific study of paranormal experiences. So it's quite unusual thing to find at university. But Edinburgh is one of a few places in the world where you can study para psychology. Why do you think they're out of everywhere in the world. Well, we have a bit of a track record. I mean, apart from

the fact that, of course Scotland has got lots of ghosts. Um. We we have a chat record in our our department, the psychology department of which is where I work. Um, for many years we've had academics at that department who have studied the paranormal. So, um, I think Edinburgh's kind of got more of an open mind if you like to do these ideas than many universities might have and

then you pivoted into para psychology. That's right. I mean, I I got into parapsychology out of curiosity as a psychologist. So I did my first degree in psychology, and I wasn't taught anything about parapsychology in that degree, but um, I knew as a psychologist that lots of people had paranormal beliefs and experiences. So I was just really curious as a psychologist about what lies behind these experiences, you know, is there any truth to them as our the je

in you and paranormal and psychic abilities. And I suspected also that there would also be a lot of psychology in these experiences. So it was really curiosity that brought me into the field. Well, because I have had some strange experiences myself, and sometimes I wonder because I definitely have anxiety. So sometimes if something I'm very anxious about ends up happening, then am I psychic or am I just super anxious and just very prepared for the worst? Yeah?

I mean that's a good example because for if you have something that you're worried about, even subconsciously, it can work its way into your mind and into your dreams. For instance, So you might dream about something that you're you're worried about and if that happens, if it comes true the next day, you may feel that you know the dream is predicting the future, but you One of the things that we found in our research is that people dream about all sorts of things, and they tend

to forget the dreams that don't come true. And so most of our dreams don't come true, and we we noticed the occasions when they do come true because it's really striking and that makes us think, oh, maybe I predicted that in my in my dreams. So there is some evidence that we forget a lot of our dreams and we're a bit selective about what we remember well,

especially if it does come true. Like you're saying, then it feels almost like playing a machine at a casino or something where you remember the time you want, but there's so many times you didn't exactly exactly. That's a good analogy in your field of work, to people scoff

at you, or is it like how are you? How is what you do received in like psychology world, In the world where you're dealing with doctors and you're also dealing with paranormal people, I'm sure always have a bunch of questions as I do for you, but I also just wonder if your peers, how did they treat you well.

It's funny, you know, if if I'm on an aeroplane, UM I tend not to tell the person next to me what I do, because yet all the stories of it, like if you're a doctor, you know, a medical doctor, and you say I'm a doctor and they say, oh, I've got this sort of can you have a look at it? So I turned, you know, if I want peace and quiet, I tend to keep it to myself what I do. But regarding my payers, my academic colleagues, those that I work with, um no. And this is

why we have para psychology at Edinburgh. They know that we're actually good scientists, so we're good researchers just like they are. But you have to probably have personal contact with the researcher to realize that. It's It's just like any other prejudice or stereotype that if you don't get to speak to the people that you have ideas about,

then the ideas can be quite mistaken. So I think for parapsychology, for it to thrive in in this sort of scientific world, psychologists like me have to be embedded within psychology departments in other university departments to break down prejudices, because there definitely is a lot of negative baggage associated with the P word. You know, some parapsychologists don't even like using the word para psychology because you think it's

already got sort of toxic associations. Looking more into parapsychology and especially your background, it really interested me because from what I've heard, maybe this has changed. You have not had an experience with anything paranormal in your personal life, not personally, No, it was it was just curiosity, sort of intellectual curiosity, and it was a psychologist in me that brought me into paras psychology. And the word paras psychology gives you a clue, you know that there is

a lot of psychology in there. So the two are quite close, closely related in many ways. Um. I do know, you know some parapsychologists who had an experience that kind of made them curious and that that's what brought them into the field. But a lot of them are kind of maverick people. They are quite independent minded. They're just adventurous,

curious people. They might not even have had a personal experience, so they just know this is a kind of of area where you can do exciting things and um, you know, explores strange ideas and make an impact as well because it's a relatively small field, so you can make an

impact because you're yourself. I'm you know, a big fish in a small bowl, if you like, yes to me, that seems like that would have a huge impact on people and our base fears of death and the unknown of afterlife in religion, which is something that holds a lot of communities and cultures and people together. And I just think that if you could scientifically back that there was a paranormal experience that is truly unexplainable, there are

so many minds that could be changed. Because you see the ghost hunting shows and they're very addictive and they're really fun and all of that. But I think what you're doing is looking at it all with this skeptical, scientific but open mind. That's right, we're trying to I mean, the problem is what we call them spontaneous experiences, that is real world world psychic or seemingly psychic experiences, and

you might include ghost experiences in that. These are actually very difficult to study in any controlled way, because they're happened unpredictably, and you know, you might take a TV crew along, but you know you can't see everything that's going on behind the camera. So to persuade the scientific community, we we think that you need to move into the laboratory and do more controlled studies. And of course when you do that, you're creating a much more artificial situation.

So there's a bit of a trade off because you lose a lot of the drama, perhaps the emotional connection that you might need in a real world psychic experience. You get kind of watered down version. I think it's important that researchers study the paranormal in the laboratory situation because it's much more controlled. You you're not losing, you lose a lot in terms of the emotional impact of the event. You're studying kind of watered down version of

a psychic experience in the lab. But I think you need that kind of control in order to persuade the scientific community that there might be something to psychic abilities in the real world. Spontaneous psychic experiences are more dramatic, but they're also much harder to study in any controlled way. They read a statistic and you would know better than I. But about fifty of people believe in the paranormal or anghosts.

Is that about right? That's about right, yes, um, And that that's taken very broadly, so that would include, for example, traditional religious beliefs, so believing in a god, or believing that you can pray and heal someone or have things happen that you want because of prayer. These would also be regarded as paranormal beliefs. So there's quite a wide definition of what what you know, psychologists would count as as a paranormal belief And of about half of these

people believe they've had a paranormal experience. So that means if you look, you know, you're walking along the street, you're looking at the people around you, about one in four will have had what they think is a paranormal experience. And that that's to me why it's obviously of interest

to psychologists to study. So even if you have a spiritual experience or a very religious experience, or even participate in praying, that you would be part of the fifty yes, that would be counted as part of the because of the aspect that, um, you know that the sense of influence for one person, which is something and something happens,

that would be a paranormal claim. So if you pray for something to happen, like a person to be healed, that have been studies, for example, looking at the power of prayer, and they come under the category of para psychology because there's no obvious normal mechanism to explain. You know, if people get better through prayer, you know what else

is going on if it's not power normal? So many questions. Um, So I have a song called praying, which is just ironic that we're talking about this, But I do find myself either talking to my higher conscious just like the best version of myself or whatever is out there or the universe. I don't really like to put a label on it because I don't know what it is. And it does bring me kind of back down to earth. It makes me feel better. And like I was saying before,

humans have such a fear of death. I think it's what drives most people in life, at least for me. What I see, it's wanting to leave a legacy and do something great while you're here, because we all know that we only have a finite amount of time, so opening up the parapsychology of it's opening up religion. You're opening up people's minds to the afterlife. And so in your heart, are you trying to prove that it exists or are you trying to prove that it doesn't? Or

do you not know? Are you open? Like? Are you atheist? Are you ledges? Are you just well, you're you're being very broad there, Kesha. You're you're saying it's do you believe in it? But it's you know, we're we're talking about a whole lot of different things. So life after death, for example, the possibility of surviving some some form of

our personality surviving after physical bodies has died. That's one hypothesis we call that the survival hypothesis, and reincarnation would be part of that, the idea that you survive and then you kind of come back. Um. But there's also the sort of psychic abilities of the living, for example, extrasensory perception, the claim that people can read one another's minds.

And then another thing that parapsychologists study is called psychokinesis or p K. That's mind over matter, So it's the claim that people can influence physical objects or heal other people by thought alone or by willpower alone. So when you ask me, Kesha, what do I think? You know, what am I trying to prove or it depends what

part we're looking at. So the survival question, for example, I have not personally done any research into survival the idea of life after death, but I having looked at the research that's been done, I found it's not to me, it's not convincing that there's any scientific evidence. Sorry everybody, but from what I've I've seen, the evidence is not not there yet, and that might just be because it's

a very hard area to to look into. And of course there's a question of faith, which is not a scientific question and we we can't even you know, study that. But for the other area that you know, where I'm actually doing my research extrasensory perception. So the idea of telepathy or or people communicating, I'm my work is actually testing that hypothesis, So I'm not setting out to prove

that it exists. So I've I've got a question in mind when I do a study, which is, you know, if we set up an experiment to see people can communicate with one another at a distance, you know, can they do it if we set up in a careful way, and so we test, we put we put them to the test and see if they can actually m communicate for example, the contents of a video clip or a postcard that's been randomly chosen. So it's about testing the hypothesis.

And then if we get evidence, you know, we don't say, oh, that proves it. We just say this study proved provided evidence in support of the hypothesis. So it's all very kind of carefully worded because I think when you do signs, you have to do you know, small steps, baby steps all the time, and just try to be very careful in what you're claiming. I was reading a book and

only a percentage of communication is actually verbal anyways. A lot of it can be visual, how you're holding your body, if you're crossing your arms, If you say something, you could say it twenty different ways, and your tone can be saying something so different. So when you do those studies, are people able to see each other they in separate places. They have to be separated for exactly that reason that

there's so much communication that's going on non verbally. UM, So we do these experiments with two people, the sender and a receiver, and they're in two separate rooms, and the sender can hear the receiver about the receiver can't hear the sender. So, um, we're trying to stop the possibility that there's any normal communication available. So that includes all the senses that we know about. You have to be really careful when you do these experiments that you're

not inadvertently allowing communication to happen. So yeah, we have we have to be very cautious with the two people know each other. The studies have tried it in different ways, so there are better results when the sender and the receiver know each other. Because I'm thinking of if me

and my best friend, I know her so well. I've known her since I was seven, So if you put us in two separate rooms, you can put us across the country from each other, and I bet one out of ten times I could guess something that she was thinking about because I know her so well. I feel like the energy that she can put off, even in silences, there can be an energy put off from someone you

know really well. What you're saying is very important, which is that people who know each other very well can anticipate each other's thoughts, and that's different from psychic often, so, for example, a married couple who have lived together for years say that you know, they can finish each other's sentences practically because they know each other's thoughts so well. Um. And And the way that we deal with that in our experiments is that the thing that the sender is

sending has to be randomly chosen. So we don't allow the sender. We don't say, go into this room and think of a draw a picture, Draw any picture, because there's a fairly good chance, if you know each other very well, that you'll be able to guess what she's drawing, like one out of ten, Yes, I totally know. Yeah, easy, easy. Um. So what we do is we have as a pool of maybe a hundred pictures, and the sender is given one randomly, so they don't they don't know what they're

going to and they don't get to choose it. They don't get to choose it. But you're quite right if they did get to choose it, then that would change the chances of success in the experiment because their preferences might match your preferences in the research that you've done. Has it changed your mind at all? Are you still neutral? Are you trying to stay as neutral as you can, or do you find yourself being swayed in one direction or the other. I'll tell you what I've changed. I'm

not convinced yet that the I mean. I'm talking about extrasensory perception studies. That's where I think the strongest evidences. So there are studies that look at mind over matter using it sounds really boring, but using random number generators, and they have very very weak effects in them, and I've I don't find them very persuasive studies. But the EESP studies using what's called the gangs field method are quite interesting. And that that's the guns felt is a

kind of mild sensory isolation procedure. So you have red light shining on your face, you wear headphones, you've got a mask over your eyes, and you essentially the receiver in this experiment basically just relaxes and free associates. They just describe what comes to their mind, so it's not like try to guess what the sender is sending. It's just describe what's in your head. And these experiments have got quite a long track record and on on the whole.

They've they've got fairly positive results. So I'm I'm following up on that on that with my own work. So my my view is that there's definitely something there in these experiments, but we don't really have much clue as to what's going on. We know we've seen some patterns. So for example, studies with selected participants do better than

studies with unselected participants. So what that means is that people who are believe in the power normal, who have had paranormal experiences, and who may have practiced some kind of mental disciplines such as meditation, or who are interested in their dreams and keep a dream diary, these participants tend to do better in these experiments than just a random person pulled in off the street. So there are

some there's some patterns. I feel like that suggests there's something going on, but we don't really understand what it means. So it's almost like being open to it. It could be. It could be that because it's a kind of a weird experience doing that experiment, you know, sitting in a comfy chair, you do a relaxation exercise, and you've got this red light on, you've got goggles on your eyes and you're speaking out loud while someone else listens to you.

It's a bit like dreaming, but you know someone's in the room taking notes at the same time, and it's a weird experience. And maybe it's simply the case that people who are creative are or who are good at meditating, are more relaxed in that environment and are better able to notice what's going on inside their head and better able to describe what's going on. So we're not quite

sure why these people do better. And that's you know, that's one of the things that our work is trying to look at when I think of psychic abilities, and also is into me with telepathy, like being able to communicate both ways and being cynical about it might actually keep you from being able to experience certain things from what you're saying, that's what I'm gathering a little bit. Yeah, Yeah,

I think I think that's the case. Um, there's there's research that suggests that people who we call it, we have funny terms in parasocology, we call it sheep and goats. The sheep are the believers, and the goats go to the disbelievers. And it's actually from it's a biblical metaphors. It's from the from the day of judgment. I think. So the sheep are the believers, the goats the disbelievers.

And there's some evidence that we actually call it the sheep goat effect in our studies, that the sheep on the whole tend to score more positively than the goats. So the people who disbelieve tend not to do so well. And I do I do think in the real world people who are sort of cynical and skeptical. I'm sure they have weird experiences, as I'm sure they do, but I think they probably find a way to explain them

away or to account for them. Um. So you know, it's not only the believers of strange experiences of para normal experiences. I think everybody does. But we have different ways of interpreting these experiences. In my personal life, usually the women I'm around we like to talk about this stuff more than men. Is that me just generalizing or have you found that to be true? That is true, It's not true that in the lab if you do a trled experience, women and men score at the same level.

But when it comes to who is willing to send in reports of experiences or who writes to the parapsychology labs. It's more women than men who report experiences. And I think that maybe not because women are more psychic than men, but because culturally it's more acceptable for a women. You know, the stereotype is that we're more kind of in tune with our emotions and are more intuitive, We're more willing

to talk about at these things. So I think that makes women more likely to report paranormal experiences than men. So it's it's not that they have more experiences, but they're more willing to talk to other people about them, right, just because of the stereotype of being emotional being very open about it. It's quite hard to know where the psychic comes in there, because it's very hard to separate what's normal and knowing each other's habits and sharing personalities

and sharing genetics, and then what's the paranormal. So it's really really difficult to to separate these two out well. Also, I would think especially genetics, like my brother, we do share the same mother, so we were raised in the

same household. And the nature versus nurture of human beings and the psychology behind that is our mothers are very open about all of these kinds of topics and nothing was off the table versus I know some people that grew up in a home opposite of that, where it was just very pragmatic, are less inclined to just talk about this kind of stuff all day. Yeah. I mean, I think when when you're trying to judge if it is this a paranormal or psychic communication or not, it's

easier if the event is unexpected. So it's a bit like I was saying, when we do our experiments, we have a sender and a receiver, and the center has a randomly selected target, so the receiver can't guess what what they're they're going to be thinking about. And I

think it's the same in life. It's something really unexpected happens, like I don't know, you you've you know, you break your ankle walking off the cab, or you know your bitten your hand gets bitten by a dog or something unexpected, and your brother or your mother or your family member gets that feeling, then that's that's more likely to be

psychic for me because it's unexpected. It was coming out of the blue, so it seems more like a kind of dramatic communication at that point, out of the ordinary exactly, not something we would talk about all the time, not saying it happens all the time. I has there been

anything you've seen that has just completely blown your mind. Well, I've I've taken part in experiments where, um, you know, I was the sender and it was scance felt experiments actually, and um, my friend was the receiver and there was one In fact, it was the other way around. I was a receiver, so I was a person relaxing with the red lights and everything. And you know, I'm not someone who thinks that they're psychic, but I and I normally don't get very vivid mental image ry at all.

So I closed my eyes, I don't really see anything. But this one time I closed my eyes and I kind of got this very clear image of a peacock feather and I thought it was so clear and unusual for me. And I just said, it's a peacock feather and she said, yes, you know, this ender, that's what the sender was looking at. So you know, I've had I've had a striking experience which was quite unusual because it was nothing like you know, normally it's not as

clear as that in the lab. So I've had that kind of experience, but it's been in a in a controlled environ and so I can't you know, I don't believe it was just a coincidence. Um. You know, I've taken part in experience, and I've also run experiments where overall I've done um, you know, have a precognition study with the gun spell, which is about getting impressions about a future target that you will see at the end

of the session. So you lie back, you relax, you describe what's going on inside your head, and at the end of the session, we randomly select a film clip and show it to you, and then we judge the similarity between your impressions and the film clip. And I've done that and got with sixty people what we say statistically significant results, meaning that we've got more successful um identifications of the picture that you would get by just

a chance. So you know, I've seen I've seen that, and that makes me think that that it's worth pursuing this line of research, because you know, I think something is going on. I am really fascinated with the psychology of people, why people are the way they are, why they are who they are, because if there was ever proof of a paranormal like a spirit hunting be opening the door to something so huge for humanity. I mean, there's a lot of ideas if you do see a ghost.

I mean, I'm actually reading a book at the moment, which is it's about um. It's called The Haunting of Alma Fielding, and it's a story. It's a true story about para psychologist who investigated a woman called Alma Fielding who had a lot of poltergeist experiences around her. Um. So, you know, objects would fly off the shelfs and so on, and he he was a psychologist, but he he tended to think of it as not a spirit, but as a sort of psychological projection from Alma of her desires

and traumas, if you like. So there are some you know, if you see a ghost or a polter geist, that doesn't mean this proof of the afterlife, to mean some that's creating the effects around you. So there's different theories basically to to explain ghosts, Like one's energy could become so powerful that you are sending or receiving an image, but that's not actually approve of afterlife. It could just

be you're wanting to it could be the living. I mean if you think, um, you know, there's a theory about poltergeist, which is this idea of objects moving around. You know. For many years, par psychologists thought that maybe the focused person that that it seemed to center on. The phenomena centered on they they thought was that like

an adolescent person. And the theory was that, well, this adolescence have kind of a lot of turmoil going on, a lot of repressed energies and feelings, and um, that that might be expressed through um, you know, instead of them actually physically acting out, they psychically act out around them. So that's one theory, you know, behind the polter Geist. What is the definition of a polter guyst because when you say poulter guys, I get so many different images

in my head from different movies and books. Well, it's a German word. Pulter means noisy and guys means ghosts, so it's a noisy ghost. So it's basically a rowdy ghost that sort of throws things around, you know. It affects physical objects with furniture around, throws plates across the room, It seems to center usually on a person. You know, it's it doesn't sort of occur randomly. It seems to there's like an outbreak in a household, and then it goes on for a few weeks and then it kind

of usually peters out. Um, So the thought was that it might focus on articular person. That's what parasitologists have thought might be going on. But the problem with these events is that they you know, they start off they're quite dramatic, but over time they gradually wane, and so they're actually quite hard to study because again they're unpredictable.

And then typically the parasitologists might come along with a camera and then nothing happens that they leave the room and they played lip taps right, or as you're saying before, it could be that you're so full of some sort of emotion that your energy is literally making things fly off the walls, and then maybe after you do that for a couple of weeks, then you've calmed down, like a good therapy session. Yes, exactly, there was a place

near Edinburgh, oh, Hampton Court. Yes, I have heard that some places do seem to have one specific kind of haunting and something that people see over and over. It's a reoccurring thing, and it's generally everyone sees a woman in the corner, or everyone here's footsteps in this one room. I don't actually know that much about Hampton Court and the underground vaults, so I was wondering if you could

just talk about that. Yeah, well, I mean there's a little bit of a difference with a ghost and haunting, So let's let's sort of do with that first of all. So ghosts might just be a kind of experience that might happen just once in one particular location, where you see a figure, for example, or you hear something and you think there's nobody actually there. But haunting is where

there's a repeated event in a particular location. And so there's certain locations, typically of course, historical locations where they develop a reputation for being haunted because lots of people have seen the same thing there or have had lots of unusual experiences in Hampton Court Palace Um in Surrey Um has quite you know, it's got five hundred years of history, so there's been plenty of Henry King. Henry's wives have been beheaded there, and that's not very nice. No, no,

he was he was harsh. She was harsh anyway. So it hit the Haunted Gallery in Hampton Courts, so called because Catherine Howard, one of Henry the Eight's wives. Um, she sort of was found committing adultery and then was sentenced to death and she ran to the king to plea for her life and was ragged screaming along this this gallery and then and later of course she was beheaded. And then in later years people would see this figure and walking in the gallery. So we did an experiment there.

This is work that I did was Professor Richard Wiseman, who I've collaborated with quite a lot, and we asked it was really about the psychology of ghostly experiences, so it was not a vigil. So it's not the sort of thing you usually see on Telly where a bunch of people sit in the haunted location with a camera and wait for things to happen. What we did was we um we got the warder of the palace, so this is the people who kind of know they take two guides around the tours round and they know where

people report the experiences. We gave them a floor plan of two areas, the Haunted Gallery in the Georgian rooms, and we got them to mark on the floor plan where it is that people report strange experiences, and there were clusters, you know, where people were reporting these experiences. So we had this kind of map and then we get off people, members of the public, a blank map and we asked them to walk around the space and to mark on their map where they were having experience.

It's like feeling chills or sensing a presence or hearing feeling at touched, you know. So we were interested to see whether people agreed, you know, with the warders what the history was, you know, where the haunted experiences were happening. And we found that yes, they did agree, even though and we one of the things we wondered was what is it Because they've read the tour book and asked

people that question before they did the experiment. Some people had no idea of the history and some people did, so we only looked at the data for those who had no idea, and they showed the exactly the same pattern. So that was that was very interesting. That suggests that there's something about these locations that are causing people to have an unusual experience because they agree it's not random. It's in certain parts of the room where they're saying, oh,

I feel cold here. So that was one of the things that we did, and then we we did a follow up experiment with a similar kind of idea in the underground vaults in Edinburgh and the Hampton Court study was like in broad daylight, it was kind of busy, um, lots of tourists mulling around. It was quite surprising that lots of the people in our experiment had strange experiences given it was actually quite a kind of bustling. It was that spooky, yeah, it was. It wasn't spooky, It

wasn't spooky. But the Emperor Vaults are are spooky. You know, they're kind of dark, they're damp, and they're kind of underground. There are the kind of underground caverns underneath the bridge. There's another one that's called Mary King's Close, which is quite a good tourist attraction. It's kind of an underground street and it also was reputedly haunted. But that that one is not a kind of ghost tour, it's quite a historical tour. I'd recommend that I'm not I have

no personal investment in this. By the way, folks, but the underground vaults. What we did was we got again, we got the tour guides, because there are people were taking tours around the vaults and they had kind of built up a dossier, if you like, a where in the vaults, which one there were ten vaults, ten rooms, which was the most spooky and where most people were getting experiences. And we ranked ordered the ten vaults from the most to the least haunted. So we had what

we called our Haunted Order. And then we got individuals of the public individually went to one of the ten vaults and then they would spend about ten minutes in there and with a questionnaire, you know, right down what they were experiencing, and we were we found that their reports matched the Haunted Order, So the same thing essentially, it was slightly different design, same thing as a Hampton Court Palace um study that people were agreeing which was

this haunted vault, which was the scariest vault to be in, and which was the least haunted? So was that when you say scary as vault to at least aunted. So is that according to historical like the most messed up things happened per room. It's it's it's not it's not that there were historical events happening there. It's not like, you know, there was a slaughter in the in one room and you know the other room as a bakery.

Not that. So it was more that when people visited these rooms before our experiment, there were more strange experiences happening in one vault compared to another one. So it was it was the track record, I feel like the ghost track record of the vaults, and we were basically finding um Even when we had people who had no knowledge beforehand of what was in the vaults, they still

agreed where the strange experiences were happening. So to us, that suggested, actually, there's something about the environment, not necessarily anything ghosts, something about shape and the lighting and the temperature and the humidity of the vaults that may contribute

towards people having um sing weird experiences. And we did find both studies found that the majority of the experiences that what we're reporting what to do with changes in temperature, usually feeling chilled, but you know, sometimes it would be the other way around, feeling unusually hot. So that might be something to do with the environment that they're in. Well, I assume like the ventilations, lighting, or if a room is just colder because it's in a different floor or whatever,

those kind of things. I'm sure you've thought of all those things. Well, we have, but I mean, I think these are quite subtle things you're not For example, if you're in a room, you you maybe not consciously thinking about, you know, how light or how dark the room is

relative to light in the corridor outside. And when we we found that that was one of the factors that seemed to influence I think what might be happening at least you know, this doesn't explain August at all, but you know what, what we observed was that people may be unconsciously responding to subtle things in their environment without being aware of it. It's not that there was like a blowing through, but you know, there could be quite

subtle even things like geomagnetic activity. So you know, um, you know, very very subtle kind of environmental things that we don't normally pay any attention to maybe having some influence on us. Another another study, if I've got time to mention, it's not study that that I did, but

it was about infrasound. Um, so this is someone called Vic Tandy, who found that he was working in a workshop and and he noticed he kept getting this kind of blurring in his vision and kept seeing a figure off to his to his right, and um, he felt it was haunted. He felt it was quite a booky experience. And then one day he had one of these big fencing swords, you know, a file that's thank you. He had it clamped in this workshop and he noticed that

it started to vibrate. And he was an engineer, so he was kind of curious, why is it kind of vibrating? And he moved it up and down the workshop and he discovered that there was a kind of a standing wave. So there was a very low energy sound wave in the workshop that you couldn't hear. It was too low for our auditory system, but it was the foil was picking it up. And he discovered that there was a

new air conditioning system had been put in. This big kind of fan was creating a kind of vibration, or a low energy vibration in the room. And that he believed, and there's evidence from elsewhere as well, that that can cause kind of strange visual effects because it can affect you that your eyeballs. So he thought it started off as a kind of haunting experience. But he believed that he found a kind of physical explanation for it. But

it took a little bit of detective work. You know, it wasn't at all obvious what what the cause was, right, It's just so interesting as you're talking and thinking of crystals and how certain kinds of stones could be have different pulls depending on what your body has made out of. So you have to take all of this into consideration, which I'm sure you do. It's just such a fascinating line of work. I mean, it seems like you would

never be boring. It never does get boring. No, no, except if I've got a hundred and fifty essays to mark. Oh jeez, Okay, well I will let you go. But I just wanted to Are you a spiritual person a religious person? No? I I like mother Nature. You know, I loved the environment and you know the planet. But you know I'm not I'm not a spiritual person. I don't think even in like these psychic moments, does it make you feel more connected to anything inside yourself or

anything else or to the other person. Well, I suppose I'm normally the person who's running the experiment rather than having the experience myself. Have you ever had an experience where it just like sent chills up your spine and it just made you feel like maybe there is something? Yeah, yeah, I had to. I mean actually, um so one of the things I did was Richard Wiseman again, was that we were doing a kind of theatrical event which was

a recreation of a Victorian seance. Okay, so see, never a dull moment in my in my job, right, And what we were doing was it was kind of an experiment because you know, we weren't trying to raise any spirits, okay, without giving any secrets away, I was kind of helping out behind the scenes, shall always say. And I had to hide, so I was like a kind of secret

accomplice I had to hide in. It was down down in Mary King's Close actually, and I was down there on my own waiting for the group to arrive, and I could hear footsteps around me, and um, I thought, that's really strange because I know there's nobody else here, and yeah, I could hear the footsteps. So that was definitely a you know, a hair standing off at the

back of my neck experience. Oh my gosh. Well, I definitely would love to check in in like five years and see what other creepy things you experience, because I bet if you're opening yourself up to it, as you said, you might be receiving more creepy things in your life. I hope so, I hope so well. I just want to say thank you very much. If you would like to tell our listeners where to find you or more

information about you, now would be the dame. Just you can tell about a girl like a website or Cussler Parapsychology Unit. That's our website, and on that you can find a little bit more about what we do and hopefully you might be able to get involved. Great. Well, if you ever need somebody to study, I'm your girl, right. Thank you so much. Thanks for infoting me. It's been fun.