SO EP:400 The Psychological Sasquatch - podcast episode cover

SO EP:400 The Psychological Sasquatch

Dec 10, 202329 min
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Episode description

In this week's special episode, Wayne and I share a recent planning session we had with Emma, a psychologist based in the United Kingdom. She's on board to assist us in addressing the challenging topic of mental health within the context of Sasquatch research. We're gearing up to host a live call-in show before the year wraps up, and we're eager to hear your thoughts. Feel free to click the button below to leave us a voicemail, or alternatively, you can reach us via call or text at 828-394-9191. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

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Transcript

Now one of your pudding. I got a string going on here, something just cause my dog. Something killed your dog? My dog. We're flying through the or over the tree. I don't know how it did it, Okay, Damn, I'm really confused. All I saw was my dog coming over the fence and he was dead. And once you hit the ground like, I didn't see any cars. All I saw was my dog coming over the fence. Happen. What are you putting? We got some wonder or

something crawling around out here? Did you see what it was? Or was it was? Standing enough? I'm out here looking through the window now and I don't see anything. I don't want to go outside. Jesus, Quice, you better hello, get thebody out here, Quen, I'm out there. It's thought of a bit of about tex forty nine. I don't know. Easy Ann out there. Yeah, I'm booking right, Heady. He didn't think so much for joining me for the show. This week is a

little bit different because I wanted to share with you guys something. It's actually a planning session that Wayne and I did with Emma over in the UK. She is a psychologist and she's been in the business for over thirty years, and she's going to help us do something that we've talked about many times on the show is address the mental health part of what happens when somebody sees a Sasquatch and what are some of the mental health issues that may cause people to

make up stories or embellish their own stories. I have been looking for a way to address this issue for quite some time because I want to do it in a very respectful way, and I don't want anybody to think that we're calling anybody crazy. That is not the case at all. But I do think it's something that we have to talk about if we're being intellectually honest and

we want to be serious about this research. It's definitely something that we need to address, and I talk a little bit about it in my new book Sasquatch Unleashed The Truth Behind the Legend that should be out early twenty twenty four.

What you're about to hear is a discussion that Wayne and I had with Emma a few days ago about this live show that we're going to do, hopefully sometime before the end of the year, and we certainly want your feedback on this, so please send me an email Brian at Paranormal World Productions dot com, or you can head over to the website and hit that leave us a voicemail button and you can talk directly into that for five minutes at a

time and let us know what you think about this subject. If there's any particular area that you want us to focus on during this live show, let us know in that voicemail. Or you can call eight too eight three nine four nine one nine one and leave a voicemail there, or you can text

that number if you feel more comfortable texting. Whatever your question, comment concern is, we would love to hear from you, and make sure you stick around towards the end of this because Emma actually had some experiences with what she believes to be Sasquatch over in the UK herself, and she tells a little bit about that story, so make sure you stick around for that. But for now, let's get into this session that we had with Emma, Wayne

and myself just a few days ago. Sociology, for example, the psychology is all about a numbers game. Are you with the normal distribution curve?

In psychology? Statistics applied because of something called the normal distribution curve? So what that claims is that if you were to go a hant and it's tailing off to the end, so all the people in the middle are the masses, and then you have outliers, and on the outliers, you're always going to have some people, statistically speaking, who will have mental health issues.

But the vast majority of people, just by a numbers game, who are in the middle, who are having cycings, can't all be mentally ill, they can't all have anxiety, they can't all have psychological disorders. Just statistically wouldn't happen. So every single person's ever claim to see Bigfoot, they just wouldn't all be lying. Statistically, just wouldn't happen. And that's the strength within psychology. So in terms of presenting it to people I've seen orbs,

I'm very empathic in terms of my belief system. I am a trained psychologist, but I'm also quite intuitive and I'm quite open to lots of other explanations, So I think that would come across in how I am, but just it would be completely not acceptable within true psychology for every single person who's ever reported a counter to be under a false belief, that would be unlikely statistically

to be the case of that. Does that make sense? Absolutely? And I think that's a great point to lead with in whatever we decided to do or how will we decide to handle the show, is to talk about it in that way and let everybody know on Front Street, hey, we're not saying everybody's crazy. We're saying the majority of the people are telling the tr the truth. We believe the encounters. But here's what we really need to hone in on, and we really want to take a serious look at the

outliers. And then we go into maybe and again I defer to you on this. My belief is this. One of the things I did in the book I just finished, is talk about some of the things, for example, with hoaxers, the personality traits that precondition people to do certain things like hoaxing and making up stories and things like that. And I think that sort of ties in with people who make up stories about Bigfoot. They have to

have some of those same sort of characteristics. So if we can talk in very specific mental health terminology about those characteristics, what they look like, and how those people are outliers, and then go into some more detail about not just hoaxing, but the people who make up the stories, why they do what they do, what would cause them to do that, And then maybe talk a little bit about not just making it up, but that other category

that I've talked about and I talk about it in the book as well, those people who experience things that happen in their brain, right, so they're having delusions, not necessarily schizophrenia, I think there's an outdated term, but talk about possibly what people would relate to a schizophrenia, having delusions, those kind of things. I even want to talk about a little bit, if

you're comfortable, maybe social contagion. Some of the other things I talk about of the book mass hallucinations, because that's something that the skeptics tend to go

to is, oh, it's just a mass hallucination. Everybody who's seen a Bigfoot is just got Bigfoot on the brain because they watched Harry and the Henderson's and they want to be a part of the big Boys club, so they make up stories about seeing Bigfoot. And then I would like to even talk about some of the negative impacts for people doing those kind of things, right,

like what do they have to lose? What are the impacts in society, their peers and people in the Bigfoot community if they're found out those kind of things. I know I'm throwing a lot out there, but I've had this on my brain for so long, and I think it's such an important thing to talk about. I want to make sure we cover all the bases. And if there's anything that I haven't mentioned that you think is important that we've talked about, or we haven't talked about that you're anxious to cover while

we're doing the subject. Yeah, there are a couple of things. The biggest thing for me that really just gets me going and just pisses me off. And and Brian feels the same way as the red circles the paradoia. These people get plan to see something in the woodline or in these bushes or these shadows, and then they always have the same response, You just can't see it. You can't see it like I see it. Is there a way that is correct? Is it possible that they are seeing something that is

there and I just can't see it. I don't understand that. That's a really good point too. Yeah, just come back at one second, just going back to picking up on what Brian was talking about, there were so many ways that this can be locked at, and so many different psychological theories can be pulled in. I just put a couple of notes, but this could be really explored. And again going back to the benefit of psychology,

it looks for patterns. So, for example, if you're claiming mass hallucination about Bigfoot, and you should be able to compare it to other phenomena and see if it's the same. If it's not the same from a psychological scientific point of view, then you should be able to use some kind of testing methodology to get some kind of statistical significance. I think I've said it ages

ago in one of the emails to you. So even though we might not be to get evidence about Bigfoot per se, there are still scientific approaches you can take by comparing population samples. Are there certain traits for people who believe in Bigfoot compared to I don't know, just off the top of my head people believe in unicorns, for example, And if you can identify clear differences, then the hypothesis is just mass hallucination becomes very shaky because it should apply

across all mythical creatures. But again you can't guess. You'd have to actually do the research. So there's topics such as what we call themastic analysis, where you take the transcripts of witness accounts and you look for actual patterns in

what they're saying. And then again, if you were to compare it to people who you knew were lying, you ask them just to make up a narrative, you should be able to have qualitative differences between that because you've got a police background yourself, so you know yourself when you're interviewing people that there are traits of people who are lying compared to people who tell them the truth.

So even though you can't prove per se that the person's seeing it, you can prove that there are statistical differences between a group who are known to be lying, and that has scientific value in its own right. So that I just wanted to pick up that point. Now if I up over to Wayne's point. Now, again, there's lots Psychology is such a blanket subject.

There's loads of different theories and approaches. You've got psychology, more biological, neurological, abnormal, what they used to call abnormal psychology, et cetera, et cetera. So there's different perspectives that could be touched upon to explain why blob squatches appear to some people and not the others. So one of

them is in the email ager center of the concept of confirmation. Bias from babies were tuned with programmed that human brings program to see faces and things of small age and confirmation about biases where you have a belief and your brain actively filters information that you want to confirm your belief and filters out information that you

don't, and it's one of the strongest findings in all of psychology. So if you've got somebody who actually doesn't believe the Bigfoot exists at all, they are going to just focus on trees and the shadows and that's all that their brain will active. In other way where you can have a visual illusion and somebody will see this the old lady, and somebody will see this as the young beautiful woman or is it a deck or is it a rabbit, et

cetera. It's the same image, the same actual image in front of people, but depending on the way that the brain filters things, don't see one or the other. So that's one that it relates to what they call the German concept of guest start, where people see figure ground kind of patterns and shapes. So there's many different types of theories of psychology that I could pull

apart and focus and relate to it. But one of the biggest ones is confirmation bias really ingrained in people that we are hardwired to to prove what we believe. Is it like an ego defense? Am I answering your question? Or can I put in a different way? Or no? That makes perfect sense? It really does. Yes, it's scary, but people definitely need to hear this, and that's something I talk about a lot of this in my book, and I clearly have no background in psychology. I don't have

a degree in psychology, so it's very difficult for me to do. I think I did a good job and putting it in Layman's terms in the book for people like me who will pick it up and talk about confirmation bias and what that looks like in the Bigfoot community. But I think at large, we need to have this conversation on a bigger scale on a show like this where people will actually listen. Tens of thousands of people will listen to it and go, oh, that kind of makes sense. So Leilanie, what

they want to believe. Even when they hear me say it, it's exactly right, Wayne and I say it all the time. It doesn't matter how great of a show we produce or what we talk about on the show. People literally will listen to a show that we just did, send us an email or make a nasty comment and say something that was totally the opposite of what happened in the show. They hear exactly what they want to hear. We text back and forth all the time, and I'll send them something and

waye to go. People hear exactly what they want to hear. Yeah, I'll just jump. It comes from the concept of what we call being a cognitive miser. The human brain is very hardwired to make habitual decisions all the time. We have to put effort into thinking outside the box, and we don't invest a lot of energy in doing that, and especially we live in quite cushy worlds, don't we sasquatch doesn't. They're on high alert because their life depends on it. We're not on higher alert in that kind of way.

So it's a content of what we call being a cognitive miser. We're lazy, so we habitually just confirm what we already know, unless there's enough what we call cognitive dissonance to make you think differently. Yeah, that's definitely what it boils down to you. So I guess the thing Wayne and I were talking before you came on, and I don't know how you feel about this, and we can certainly suss it out between the three of us and

make a decision. I think this would make a great live show for people to be able to interact, call in and ask questions and share their opinions and thoughts. We had a good time doing it a couple of thursdays ago. It was, of course a lighthearted show and we weren't talking about mental health and those kind of things. But I think people are interested in it enough, and we found it with that Bigfoot podcast. So far, with some of the episodes that we've done, in some of the things we've covered,

people are hungry I think for this kind of information. We talk about people who are clearly making up their stories or they're hoaxing things, and listeners reach out to us and say, I'm so glad that you're talking about this because nobody else is talking about it. I think this is something that falls in that category. I don't think a whole lot of people are talking about

mental health just in general. We could even throw in there some of the maybe the PTSD stuff that comes along with people who have had what they believe to be an encounter with sasquatch. I think that would be something on the back end to throw in for people, because we see that, at least I do a lot of times, and some of the people who have had

these encounters, and I know Wain can probably say the same. These people go through a lot of emotions, whether their experience was real or perceived, they sty'll have the consequences happen after they have this alleged encounter with what they believe to be a sasquad. So I think maybe even that's something we can talk a little bit about as well. I don't know, how do you feel about doing a live show. I talk every day and day. I've

just students through a living so I'm quite really confident. I'm pretty interested in the PTSD aspect. So I've been a psychologist is my early twenties, so thirty years of psychology, and I've always been interested in Bigfoot from a small child. But what really influences me. Really is hearing the trauma in the witnesses voices. I know as a psychologist, and I've heard you say on the shows how hard it is to actually take emotions. It's really hard to

do, to genuinely have that wobbling your voice. As you probably know, an olympic system is kicking in the rational part of the brain is going offline. Now, the olympic system doesn't have imagination, So a trauma times person is very unlikely to be coming up with a very elaborate story because it's not in that part of the brain. So a traumatized person who's had this encounter with something which is completely terrifying outside cause them cognitive dissonance. They can't conceptualize

it. They really can't get their heads around it. It comes across just in their voice. Obviously, most of what I'm listening to a podcast, so it's only ordered tree you can actually see the people and to just fake that fear. They're saying, I'm sorry, I'm back there now, I'm reacting as if I'm there. That is what happens in post traumatic stress. And as I'm saying, the imagination's gone offline. When I do with my

students. I work with a lot of traumatized students. If I hold up my hand, you see it them is the limbic system the brain, very small part. It's all world. It's got very little ability other quite white

and freese. And if I fall over by hand, this is the prefrontal core text, the thinking part of the brain where storytelling is imagination is So if you've got some use obviously coming across as traumatized in an interview, they're very and very unlikely to be making it up because that part of the brain befrontal cortext has gone off like it's got separate wire in the two can't be engaged at the same time. Then this is where they can give very detailed

accounts of what they actually experience. But anything fanciful it is not likely to be happening. That really interests me as a psychologist listening in. That's the kind of stuff that we need to be talking about and letting people here because as an offshoot here really quick, the question has come up in my mind

several times, and you just mentioned it. Is it normal for a person who's recounting their encounter and they're having this emotional or what appears to be an emotional response to being back there, is it in your opinion in psychology, is it a normal thing for people to say that out loud and go hold on a minute, it's like I'm back there again, because I've interpreted that a couple of times from people like it's almost maybe not real, and they're

telling me that because they're trying to influence me, and maybe the people that are listening to I'm sorry, I'm back there now, I'm having a hard time that kind of thing, like it's almost put on. So is that a normal thing? Obviously that they could act it and there's nothing that say they're not acting it. But again there's other things that go with the package

of when they become limbic system dominant. Yes, it is normal. So what happens is when somebody's traumatized, the michdala of the brain is flooded with cortisol stress hormones. So what happens and when somebody's traumatized is they became that part of the brain becomes hypersensitive in the future to adrenaline. So what that means, what they call that regulation. What that means is you only need

a little bit of stresshormone to put which you're back there. Actually Olympic system to hijack your brain be fredical cortext goes off and you go limbic system. So all those kind of memories which were encoded in the traumatic experience are being reactivated. So that person is literally they're back in the limbic system part of

the brain, not in the whole brain. They're back in that part of the brain because it's imagine if you're in the woods and you're going to be potentially murdered, your brain needs to remember everything it can about that situation with the aim will stop and you've been in that situation again. So this is why these memories become deeply encoded, often associated with smells, and then they

start to recall often that the bad smells mentioned. So they're all back in that part of the brain is taken over as a survival instinct to make you high per vigilant. Yeah, just the way that people be talking like a good thing that you could potentially do. When you're sensing that somebody has become the Olympic system dominant, you could question them in a different way because say, what do you feel? What you see and what you've said. Sin.

If you were to talk a lot about the senses, you probably get quite good information. There's somebody making it up. Would probably alter the struggle and stay tuned for more sasquatch otasy. We'll be right back after these messages or be overly one way or the other. Probably. I feel like a better interviewer already, Wayne, don't you. I'm picking up taking up where she's putting down. Man, I can't tell you how excited I am. I wanted to tackle this subject. Brian can tell you. We both wanted

to tackle the subject for so long. How do you do it without insulting someone that we've been wanting that? Right person, it sounds like we've got you. Did they come on and explain things because you're doing a great job with us. I'm understanding it a lot more. I'm excited about this, Yeah, it is. It is really exciting because I've been listening to the podcast for such a long time and running all these things my mind. Yeah,

it's really exciting. But once you start looking at people in terms of parts of the brain and what part is activated instead of as a whole person, so to speak, I had to do this on a daily basis.

I'm working with trauma TAI students on the autistic spectrum, in particular with dyslexia, they readily go into overwhelm or A lot of my work is trying to get them to switch back to that prefedal cortex where they can think and they can plan and they can reason when they used to seeing people's parts of the dream rather than a person. But that's why I hear a lot listening is

the trauma. It's a red flag to me when there's not true. Have you ever personally dealt with anyone any of your students that have experienced something like what Brian and I deal with, either cryptic or paranormal or something unusual. That's a really good question. Obviously we're in the UK now, I have had people with more paranormal feeling. Maybe they've had spiritual possession. Now I don't discount that because of my belief system. I see everything as energy and

different levels of energy. Myself, I think I've had a Class B SASPAT encounter in Wales. Myself, I do believe the here. I believe there in many places where humans just aren't going. My friend moved to a property that everything's small compared to America. Maybe an acre, but it had an

orchard that was deserted. He hadn't cared for the property at all. Of course, I'd come along all interested in bigfoot, and I was shown the pictures of tree breaks, tree structures, and she's there in the woods behind. Have you heard a big foot? Tony. Yeah, he's fairly local to hear, so he believes he's seen had an account a couple of miles

away from me. So in the property where my friend was living, we went to the orchard and there's this massive tree break about maybe send foot, and it was such a clean tree break, and I'm looking at this think it could be likely, and I suppose. And then when I went a couple of weeks later, they had a bigger pen and long grass. The

boy who is I don't know, fifteen. You really don't believe he was the type to liar hoax to me, maybe eight foot long oval depressions in the grass overlooking the chicken pen, two of them, And why are their oval depressions in the grass. There was road works being done which ended a lot of undisturbed property behind my property, and I had a rabbit who's head was pulled off, and you think, is it a fox? Why didn't they take it? And then on top of that, then it was on

the main road. But the manglad is next to land there was an webside down tree quite in large upside down tree? Did you add the ticking? Am I imagining this? But again with the bigfoot evidence, even though the these potentially class be things, is this concept of circumstantial evidence, isn't it? At what point in the court of law that would circumstantial evidence? I think in the big sub community we're not treated like other things, like within

the law. As you went to law, you'd be able to prove the case, wouldn't you. But I literally have a chapter in the book that I just finished called can We Convict Sasquatch in a Court of Law? Just to lay out the different types of evidence and talk about what real evidence is, how much we have circumstantial and otherwise for the existence of bigfoots. I

definitely think this is something we should do. The only issue with and I'm thinking about it as we're talking, the issue with doing a live show is the majority of the time we would be doing a live show over here it is like in the middle of the night early morning for yous. I don't know how we would work that out, because we'd be doing the earliest. I would probably say we need to start a live show. Here would be seven Wayne. Would you think that's like midnight for you? That's okay.

I'm a big enough band to do it. It's a mission. I think we just need to do it as really flexible and really easy going. Psychology is such a huge topic. This is so exciting. I'm not away of anyone else putting this spin on it. The psychology is still science, so if you can adopt some of the research methods within psychology, it's going to be difficult to argue against it because using the same method papers get published.

That's what I would be interesting to do as well, would be published research papers using some of these scientific methods, such as thematic analysis, where you're looking at that you might, for example, take ten narratives from people who are claiming to be genuinely traumatized. Then you ask another ten people to make up a traumatic story, and then you find patterns that differ between the argaically true ones and that noel made up ones, and then that could lend yourself

to a scientific paper. Awesome, Thank you so much. Is Mike there, He's not himself, he's such a fan of yours. He just loves your voice. That's why I was asking. I was going to say hello too, if tell him I said hello, It was great to meet you, man. Anything I can to happens really important. Oh, thanks so

much, Ema, I appreciate it. Welcome. It reminds me a lot of John and that way of explaining things that makes it easier to understand the way she talked about if I understood right, If you're a hardcore critic and Bigfoot is not real, you're never going to convince that person that Bigfoot is real. If you show them a picture of a tree line, all they're going to see is trees. If you have a person that's hardcore bigfoots everywhere, that's all they're going to see is a big Foot face. And I

think most people are in the middle. Yeah, and people like us that are in the middle. We're not the ardent skeptics that will never believe it. We want to believe it. It goes back to what she said, it's confirmation bias. It's the biggest issue in most things, ever, and particularly with Bigfoot, it's confirmation by people believe what they believe, and then everything that happens is just a confirmation of what they already believe, and you

can't move them off of what they believe, no matter what. I was John the whole time because I heard him say confirmation biased. I can't tell you how many times they say, you don't gotta go home, but you can't stay. No, I don't want to be world out it chid this job child, everything joy for me in still right, You come in right away, side steps still stay standing, inside steps step still hess pssst F state plays and pst pssst USS insist

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