How ESP Works(?)

but it's not tiny. It's cozy. But it is our all ours, Yeah, how ours. Everybody else at house Stuff Works doesn't really know that yet, but they will. Uh yeah, because when we actually have butt detection and when someone sits down these seats that aren't LSD to get a shock and plus an alarm goes off at our desks, what's called d M R T M. I how are you, sir? I'm pretty good. I feel like this is fancy. This

is our first real like studio. That's not true, not no, I'm trying to remember the last one was no. But it's not a utility closet. It's not a lactation room. It's not Yeah, it's not a murder room. It's not like an office with like desk for like office furniture. Yeah, it's a it's a studio that was built out for the specific purpose of recording podcasts. All we have to do is put up our Aaron Cooper originals. The artwork, got a couple of those waiting, and we gotta work

on the lighting in here a little bit. Yeah, Jerius, it's such gonna hang some china balls for us. Yes, you keep pushing the china balls. Um so, anyway, enough about that. We just wanted to say we're super excited to be in our new office, in our new studio. It does feel good. Kudos for that intro. I'm not gonna say that. I knew you were going to say that. Yeah, I was going to say that too. I knew that you were thinking of saying that. Chuck. Yes, uh ESP. Do you believe in ESP? No? No, not at all.

What do you think it is? Because surely, I mean just about anyone could agree that humans have some sort of ability somehow to make good guesses or to the future, whatever you want to call it. Do you agree or do you think it's strictly just us selectively paying attention

to random instances over others. I think it's that. And yeah, and as we'll talk about, I think it's the just the nature of coincidence is going to happen because so many things happen every day, Uh, that something is bound to seem like something you dreamed about the night before at some point in your life. Yeah. But the other millions of dreams you have that, don't I think those are the ones that are the the tell you know,

do you? I don't know, like I want to. I spent so many years of my life believing and stuff like that and wanting to go to to Duke University to study at their paras psychology department believe. Yeah, and but you know, believing in ghosts and all this and just that's how I spent my childhood just reading about stuff like that voraciously. So Ghostbusters really did a number on you. Yeah. Yeah. When that came along, I was like,

this was made for me. Um. But as an adult, it's not so much that I believe in the esp it's more that I UM, I refused to just utterly disbelieve in the possibility of it. Okay, you know what I mean. Yeah, I got you there, because we don't know everything about everything yet, right, but uh yeah, I'm in the I'm the other camp. And I'm not even say the skeptic camp because there's people just plug me bad name some due to some bad apples. Not all skeptics,

but there are some that are horses asses. Can we say that? I don't know, we'll find out. Um, All right, well let's talk about And I thought this was interesting because I never knew that uh ESP is just a big collective term for all manner of uh paranormal paranormal phenomena, which you could also call SI. Yeah, and so dude named jb Ryan, who will talk about later, he coined ESP the granddaddy. And then in the forties another guy coined the term sigh and sigh is the Greek letter

and it's equated with psyche or the soul. And the reason that the guy chose SI is because he felt ESP suggested it was something supernatural, and SI, he felt, suggested that this is a normal part of humanity we just don't understand and it's it sounds like science, right, Um. But there are several categories of ESP UM and this is the one. I never knew the actual definitions for these. I sort of just threw them all in a bag together. You have telepathy, and that's when you can you know,

you're over there reading my thoughts. Yes, like Chuck is really not happy to be in the new studio. That's not true. He'd rather be at home on the couch. I'm reading your thoughts right now, and I know that you like this place. Okay, Well, you're you're a telepath. Uh. Clairvoyance, which is the ability to see events or things objects happening somewhere else at the same time. So are you doing Are you a clairvoyant? I am. I'm seeing your couch right now, and I'm saying it's not that comfy. Yeah,

so you're not missing that much at the moment. I know somewhere Jonathan Strickland is waxing his head, bald head. That's just the logical assumption. Uh. Then we have our precogs precognition. That's when you see into the future. Retrocogs retro cognition. You can see into the distant past. That's there's another um that's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition, like seeing you know a cave like took took running around with the dinosaurs like you do, which I guess

never would have happened. Um. But there's another term for retrocognition, whereas something in the future affects something in the past. So a decision you make in the future affects your past. And an example given is that, um, you have a dream about a dinosaur. Now, let's a spotted dog, and then the first thing the next morning, you go outside to water your lawn and the same spotted dog or

a similar spotted dog walks by. The idea isn't that that was very coincidental or that you had esp and your dreams, but that you seeing that dog in the morning affected your dream the night before. So that's another definition that's emerging for retrocognition. That's getting a lot of traction because of the stuff we're finding on the quantum scale, just weirdness like that. All right, Then you have your mediumship and that's um ms Cleo who can channel dead

spirits forgot about her? And then you have how much money that woman grossed in the nineties. She made a lot of though I hope so yeah, I mean, she was working hard, she had a finite window of opportunity, and she worked that whole time. She didn't like buy a sailboat and sail around the world after like a first million. You know, like she worked. So you're not in the camp of like she's taking people's money and taking advantage of people. I see that argument, sure, for sure.

I also see like if people want to spend their money on that and they get something out of it, knock yourself out. Uh. And then you have a psychometry, which is the ability to read info about a person place, uh by touching the person object. And that's what I like to call the dead zone. Christopher Walking, he would place his hands on you and he would see something. Man. I think we talked about it recently about how that movie holds up. Still. Yeah, it's such a good movie. Yeah,

it really is good. Chris Walking. There's another one, Chuck Um called telekinesis, which is like Uri Geller stroking a spoon and it bending right, like being able to manipulate matter just using a light touch or your mind, but there is no spoon. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't that from matrix Um. All right, So basically, uh, like you said, J b Ryan is the the granddaddy of all this, and he actually started studying. I mean, he was a

legitimate scientist, he wasn't some quack. And uh, this was in the nineteen thirties where he started at Duke University studying para para psychology basically. And he wasn't the first. He was one of the first UM laboratory experimenters in academia to really study SI. Right before him, probably about forty or so years before him, William James and some of his pals at the Society for Psychical Research UM really laid the groundwork for applying the scientific method to

the study of paranormal phenomenon. And they did two things. They outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like very famously Madame Blevartsky. But then they also investigated ones like they approached them typically with like an open mind UM, and if they found somebody that they just couldn't explain, they would they studied them. So they were they were studying each one with an open mind. And the ones they figured out

where frauds they outed as frauds. The ones they figured out couldn't quite explain, they sought to investigate scientifically rather than just saying, oh, they're frauds somehow. So that was the groundwork of the study of sigh. What was Madame Blevartsky Steel of the Cony Allen She was she actually she was almost a cult leader. You could argue she was she um. She created um. Oh man, it's called like theodism, I think, which is um. It was. It

was almost a cult. It was a huge um movement in the nineteenth century where like you go to like a seance and there was a medium there and they would channel like the spirits of the dead, relatives of people who were they're holding hands in the circle and stuff like that. And she gained a lot of power and wealth and prestige until she was outed as as a fraud. And I don't remember the the it's theosophy, that's what it is. Not to see theo is m. Theo ism has to do with theo Huxtable. Uh did

you see The Source Family, by the way, that documentary. No, I haven't about the l a cult in the seventies. I saw the the Icon on Netflix and never clicked as a good it's really good and it's it's it's awesome. Actually, I recommend everyone it's one of those where like they interview a lot of them today and they weren't like, you know, they didn't commit suicide. Like everyone was like it was pretty great. Oh yeah, yeah, they're all fine. They're all just a bunch of hippies. Still. They were

out in l A. Yeah, yeah, right in Hollywood. There was one and um, there was a documentary I saw about a cult in Miami and they were like super fundamentalist Christian but they also were um the basis of their religion was was formed on pot too. Well that's what the Source family was. I wonder if they were related. Well, it was the seventies. Yeah, there were a lot of pot cults, I bet. But did they turn into like

huge pot dealers. No, I don't think so. This cult they had a band though, and the called the Source. You know, I can't remember the name of the band, but it's pretty interesting to transfer that. It's a really good documentary. That was just funny to see all these people. Now they're like it was awesome. Yeah. I had a

lot of sex and smoked a lot of weed. That's kind of what they These guys didn't seem to have a lot of sex though they were like real, like um, compartmentalized gender wise and like male dominance and all that. But they just smoked a ton of pot all the time, including their little kids. Well that's not like like four year old smoke. That's terrible. Yeah. There it was in the documentaries we're seeing. I don't remember what you had me up? You lost me there. I lost everybody there

in that documentary. Yeah. Um, all right, So back to this ESP thing, um, jb Ryan, Yeah, jb Ryan. Well, basically there's a there's a lot of different outlooks on what ESP might be. Um, some people think that everyone's got it, but some people, um, it just pops up every now and then, um, like I might have a

dream that comes true or whatever. Other people think that only certain people have it, have the the gift as they say, uh, and that they have to be in this special like you know, mental state to access at the shinnon the shitting. And then other folks say that everyone has that potential, but um, some people are just like in tune with it and some people aren't. And

you follow in none of those three camps. Um, So we'll talk a little more about some ideas of what ESP is right after this so Chuck, Um, you said that basically how people see ESP is either everyone has it, some people have it, or no one has it. Basically, Uh, whether you're a skeptic or a believer. Um, if you are a believer in ESP and somebody comes to you and says, okay, explain ESP like it is it. There's

actually a couple of very common suggestions or proposals. One made sense for a while before we knew a little more about the brain. Um, and that was that EESP was some form or fashion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we were receiving information from outside of our usual senses. Yeah. And like you said, it fell out of favor because, um, basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves through

time or there. It didn't pick up on special some special part of your brain that like receives this message. And there was a UM did you see that study I sent you? That was I think from two ten where they put people in an MRI I and then showed them, um, different pictures or whatever. H And they did they showed like they I put you in the wonder machine and now I'm showing you a picture of flower and that's it. It's lovely, except that it sounds like a German rave. Okay, a little bit um, but

that would be uh. The non ESP stimuli the control group to test ESP and to see if the brain reacted differently, and then to see if there was a part of the brain that's picking up on ESP. I would show you the flower, and then in the other room, I would also show Emily that flower. They think about it and send you the thought of that flower, So you're getting ESP stimuli and then non e SP stimuli.

And from the m R I they showed that the brain didn't react differently, So it suggests that there isn't a sensory organ or region of the brain that's responsible for picking up ESP, which doesn't debunk the possibility of ESP. It just undermines the idea that there's a region of our brain that would be responsible for picking that up. Plus of Emily's over there, I'm my first guess is gonna be dog every time I'm in its flower And

this well, it wasn't about guessing. It was just to see, like showing you ES the e SP version and then the non e SP version of the same thing, so you weren't guessing do you understand. Yeah, I get to know. I would have guessed dog or wine. There wasn't guessing. That's the way I guessed. Family thinks she has a gift a little bit, so she would have been disappointed. She s, yeah, a little, she thinks. But I think she's just super observant and intuitive. But that's definitely one

explanation for it, which we'll get too, of course. Um. So these days there are other theories, one of which is that, uh, it's called spill over, that there's basically another dimension that we that doesn't you know, have our laws here and are dimension and that sometimes stuff just sort of spills over from that and we see the future of the past. And if you're a skeptic, you probably just pulled the decent sized clump of your hair

out of the side of your head at that point. Yeah, because this is something you can't prove obviously, it's like completely um And of course they'll say it exactly yeah,

you know. Yeah, And I think I got the impression from this article that, um, they were making that point like science is just chasing its tail and trying to explain esp because it's not currently capable, and science goes it doesn't work like that, you know, um, at least with the electromagnetic spectrum explanation, it was pointing to something that we already know exists, right, It's just that there there's no way to show that we would be getting

how we would be getting information from it, because the electromagnetic explanation, it basically says if you compare it to other findings from ESP, it makes even less sense. Because with the ESP, one of the hallmarks of it is that no matter whether you're out there are outside of the studio thinking about wine or a dog or something and I'm picking up on it, or if you're in China and I'm here and we're doing the same thing,

that the signal doesn't weaken at all. Yeah, And that just flies in the face of all we know about electromagnetic rights, exactly right. So there's a lot of things wrong with the proposals of what ESP is. Uh. Yeah.

But you know, the reason why people still believe in this stuff is because of either hearing a story about their friend who said, you know, listen to this crazy thing happened, or experiencing it themselves in some way or another, having a dream that something similar happened, and all of a sudden, you're like, I might have the gift exactly, or it popped up in me, you know, briefly at least.

And there's a I mean, there's a lot of um evidence of strange and unusual occurrences that support the idea of esp um. This article gives a really good one about UM. A book called Futility that was written by a guy named Morgan robertson right, and in it the guy details this book or this boat called the titan Ship. Yeah ship, the boat, a big old boat, um, which is sailing across the Atlantic and hits an iceberg at night and sinks and a bunch of people die because

they weren't enough lifeboats. Yeah, this is And if that sounds familiar, the Titanic did the same exact thing, the Titanic, not the titan did the same exact thing fourteen years later. Yeah,

if they're there are a bunch of similarities. Um. The titans struck an iceberg in the book on the starboard side on an April night in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland, and the real Titanic struck an iceberg on the starboard side in April in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland on the starless Night. I don't know about that, Okay, Uh, they were both said to be unsinkable. Um, more than half of the passengers of the Titanic perished and more than half of

the passengers and crew on the titan perished. So there's all these things in there. But you do a little more digging and you find out that Robertson was he was a seaman, and he knew a bunch of this stuff. And it's not unreasonable to think at the time they wanted to build the biggest ships, and the word titan it would be a great name back then for a super big ship. And that sailing route uh was a common one, and there were icebergs, and April might have

been a common month for that kind of voyage. So all of it can be explained away kind of um, but it is definitely something you look at go oh interesting, It is interesting, and it's amazing coincidence, and it focuses the attention and captures the imagination. Um. But then yeah, once you hear about Robertson's background, it becomes slightly less impressive.

So then kind of too over the years that little Colonel got erased and added to it was that this idea for this book came to him in a trance, which bolsters the espy Is that true or is that just been added? Uh, I'm sure it was added over the years. Which is a big problem with this kind of anecdotal evidence is that you know, it gets embellished in that. Yeah, exactly. And uh, it's just it's not enough that this is a really interesting, unique circumstance or

coincidence or whatever. There has to be this extra layer of proof, like it came to him in a trance. Come on. Yeah. Um. So back to Rhyan, he did some um. Like I said, in the nineteen thirties, he started studying the stuff with one of my favorite inventions, um by his colleague Carl Zenter. Of course, if you seen Ghostbusters he was using. He was using a version

of Zentner cards. Um. The shapes weren't all exactly. I think there was one that was different Um and Ghostbusters, But the original Zentner cards were was a deck of twenty five Plaine white cards, with each of them had one of five symbols, a circle plus sign, a square, a star, five point star and the three wavy lines

like water a river. So what that is? Okay? And the idea is that, just like in Ghostbusters, you hold it up and UM asked the you know, not showing them the card at obviously not the symbol, and say what do you see? And they say what they see? And then you record after the deck how many they got? Right? Right, But the person holding the card is supposed to be thinking about what they're seeing so that the other person, the target, the receiver, can pick it up tele telepathically. Yeah,

and I did they have these online? I took the test yesterday, UM, and I went through the deck and I only got six out of and at the end it just said you are not a psychic. Really, Yeah, that was kind of funny. Statistically speaking for just one trial, that is more than chance. You did better than chance, So maybe you do have a touch six of what what would chance to be a chance would be if there's five different ones, and so this was six of

twenty four would be uh no, that's not no, that's less. Yeah, No, you did six of you did, so five of five would be chance. Okay, so I got one more? Yeah? Well, and I think like three of the first eight or so or six I got, and I was like, I've got the gift, right, but I didn't know, like it's randomly generated, and so it's not like someone was on the other side thinking of that card. So I literally I was like, what do I do? I was like,

I'm just guessing. So that brings up some interesting stuff, like there's there's um evidence that when a machine is involved that there is no telepathy. There would only be clairvoyance. Right, So I mean if if if telepathy is you picking up what's in someone else's mind and the computer is mindless, then you shouldn't be able what you were saying, like you should it shouldn't You should not be able to

know what zenter card it's going to pick next. Right, But there have been investigations using computers and using machines that show above chance that there is some sort of weird interaction like a random number generators. So Princeton University has a department called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Department. Pair right and pair has been doing studies for a couple of decades. The millions of trials and basically they'll say this is a random number generator or this this

machine operates randomly or whatever. We want you to think of a number, and we want to see if you can influence the numbers that this computer spits out. Oh so you're thinking of the number, then you're okay. The human is trying to affect the computer, the output the behavior of the computer. Of course, if you're sitting across the room or in another room thinking about a number that a random generator should put out, it should have

zero effect whatsoever. It's a computer. The weird thing is is what Princeton has found is that yes, over enough trials, you there is a slight, very slight, but measurable effect that human thought has on a random number generator. It's

it's on Princeton's website. And this is stuff that like is apparently accepted in the in the scientific community that the the the trials that they are running are so widespread and so repeatable and have been done so many times that the data that they're coming up with is is it's significant. Well, Ryan, with his inner card experiments in the thirties did find that some people um got

what they thought were pretty impressive results. It's like, you know, a few I can't remember their names, but Hubert Pierce was he one of them. He was the one how many what was his percentage? He had one where he got, um, remember how you got three in a row and you're like, oh my god, he got twenty five in a row once. Come on, no, I'm not kidding. He was also documented iss selecting five hundred and fifty eight correct out of eight hundred and fifty which is the odds of that

happening by chance, We're twenty two billion to one. Now, were these the early experiments? Because okay, because I did read that UM and this seems like I can't believe he didn't check this. Apparently the early cards were a little translucent. Oh yeah, some of them were. And then he corrected for that and the and the percentages went down and then they U I know other scientists said that you are somehow influencing with your body. Tell like

you basically you don't have a good enough poker face. Yeah, And the earliest um Ryan experiments with the center cards, he would hold the card up and he'd be making eye contact right right the guy. Yeah, the guess it would be like is it the way line? And yeah,

he start shaking his head almost imperceptive. Um, but he uh he, that's called sensory leakage, where you the person who is um holding the card and knows where the card is somehow, there's some detail about your face that when you do a thousand trials with somebody, they start to pick up on and it affects their guests. That influences their guests. So to um correct for that, to control for that a sensory leakage in that um, they

they came up with something called the gans Field experiment. Yes, that's a German gunsfeld Um that means whole field in German. And that is when they started putting people um, they would start depriving their other sense is basically, uh, they would be in a like a dimly lit room with red lighting and they would have white noise, and they would have their eyes covered with these uh special glasses or ping pong balls cut in half like Kermit the fraud.

I guess later on they said, we should just make some classes exactly We've got the funding. So basically the idea was, let's rule out any uh any of that gross censury leakage, which smells um. So yeah, Apparently later on in Rhyan's experiments. Um, after he started controlling for stuff, the percentages started to drop. Yeah. Correct, Um, he's he was.

Also he's generally a respected researcher for a couple of reasons. One, whenever he did whenever evidence of like um, some sort of bias or fraud or something was brought to him, he corrected for it. He wore glasses in a white right. That was another one. Um. But also he was daring enough to stake his entire career on a field of study that will get anybody mocked publicly privately. Um, can

really shut down a lot of opportunities for you. This guy and his wife, Louisa Ryan both dedicated their careers to establishing the field of parapsychology and really studying it and then just walking away from it. I don't think he was like, I really want to prove this is true? Was he? Uh? Yes, he did? That was that was

a huge criticism of him. He was a definite believer. Um. He was quoted by I don't know what the guy's steal was, but one day he was visited by one person and the interviewer who went on to write a paper I think in scientific American to expose him. He said he kept a file of people of the results of tests where um, people he suspected were purposefully getting things wrong because they didn't like him to mess with his data, he just took those and never published him.

He didn't include him in the results, which would definitely affect the number of correct hits. Right. Um, that was a huge criticism. That's not good science at all. But he was definitely a believer, which was another criticism. But

he was daring and he did um. There was another story where it's called the Levy affair where a guy named Levy, who was an electrical engineer working in the lab, unplugged uh, I guess the censor that would correct negative hits for a little while during a trial, so that all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits, um and so, and then he plugged it back in. Well, this one guy saw what the guy was doing and went to Ryan. And Ryan went to the guy Levy

and said, did you do this? And let me say, just it's like you're fired, and just like through the results away and all that. So he wasn't like he was a true believer, but he wasn't just some like outright fraud, right right, But he was and still is under the microscope as much as probably any researcher in all of academia ever has been. All right, well, right after this break, we'll talk a little bit about what

skeptics say about ESP All right, Josh. One thing you'll hear skeptics say a lot is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I have to agree with him, and Uh, it is an extraordinary claim here. And UM, so far there hasn't been um extraordinary evidence. And one of the things I pointed to earlier that I think is what's going on if you look at statistics, you look at six billion people on planet Earth, uh, and them thinking a good zillion things each day. And that is scientific, by

the way. Um, at some point somebody is going to think something that it mirrors something that happens in the near future. Uh, And it's just chance and coincidence. I have a great example of that, man. It happened this very morning. Yeah I did. Um. I was at the printer. You know, we just moved offices, and I was at the printer and I had like an extra piece of paper that I didn't need, and I realized, like, we have no paper recycling here. So on my way back

yet that is everyone out there. It's like, what kind of office would have, right, we just said we have a we have a fifty gallon drum that we throw stuff into that it catches on fire and then we send it up a burning drum, that's what it's called. Now we're getting those soon, um, right, and we are getting hip soon. I know this because on my way back to my desk, I popped into Izzy, the I T guy who's also the head of all recycling and stuff here. It's like, is he need a paper recycling

bins by the printer? And he goes, I'm writing an email right now to everybody about that very thing. You almost did your USY impression close, um, And so like I thought about it. That's pretty amazing, you know. But it was about nine in the morning, and this is a company wide email, so it would be something that is he would probably knock out about that time. The reason I was thinking of is because I was just

at the printer. We just moved into this office and we didn't have bins yet, so it was still a potential thing for somebody to be thinking about. Or doing or writing an email about UM. And so there's all these different really overlooked variables or factors to this whole thing that that you don't think of. Instead, it just seems like an amazing coincidence or ESP. To me, the really significant thing was that I happened to be researching ESP while this happened. That's what it really kind of

stood out to me. But if you really kind of look at it, like, there's a finite amount of things that people could think about in any given day, in any giving context, in an office or something like that. Like had I been a goat at a petting zoo and I went over and UM talked to the cow and the cow was writing the email about recycling bins. Maybe, but we're in an office. I'm talking to the guy about recycling bins. There's just a lot of stuff that you kind of once you take that into account, it

becomes less amazing. Like like the the guy writing the Titan Titanic book. Yeah, you know, I used to happen to me, now that I think of it, is UM. I used to And this it's weird. It was only with phone land lines that hadn't happened with the cell phone. But I used to like, no, the phone was gonna ring right before it rang, like almost go to reach for it. Um. And I mean it's not like it happened all the time, but it happened enough times where

I was like, that's weird. Sure, I know what you're talking about, but and that was all it was to me. I was not like I the gift. But think about it in in that respect to you know people, So was it you knew who was calling or just that the phone was about to just that it was about to ring. Now, yeah, that is weird. You definitely do have esp yeah, um. Or maybe I don't know, maybe the phone made a little tick noise right before it rang that I didn't pick up on, but only subconsciously.

You know. Well that's another explanation for today that um right, that um there is uh subliminal stuff in the environment that is just too weak in nature for us to pick up on consciously, but our unconscious does or subconscious does, which frankly opens up a whole other can of worms. You know, as far as you know, how real is

that kind of thing there? But probably a little closer to reality is the idea that um our attention isn't focused on everything that we're picking up at all times, like like I see your beard and I see your shirt and everything, but I'm still also picking up like sensory information from like Jerry's computer that I can see in my peripheral vision or whatever. My attention isn't focused

on it, but my brain is still receiving information. So the idea that our brains can put it together all this information that we're not aware consciously that we're receiving, um, but we're still getting impressions from it. That'sh that that

could be a great explanation for ESP as well. Yeah, and you know what, now that I think about it, the fact that it's never happened with my cell phone sort of makes sense because maybe there it was a mechanical function a landline, right, Yeah, like you said a click or a tick, but I think you meant like a click And it wasn't even the newer model. This was back in the day when it was like yeah,

ringing like bell, So maybe that does explain it. Yeah, I've got another good example that I came across and researching this. UM. Let's say that you and I are hanging out and you're humming baby, I'm five work right, just over and over again. I don't know that song, but I'm reading Yes you do, No, don't, Yeah you do? It? Was it Katy Perry? I don't know Katy Perry anyway, um, although I will have to say I did love that halftime show. It was great, well it was. It was hysterical.

What's up with the sharks being a meme? Now? I would think they were really significant. She looked like she was worked at corn Dog on a Stick. I don't know what that is. That's not all corn dogs around sticks. It's that place in our hot Dog on a Stick that was called that place in the mall where they wore those big giant Yeah. No, I don't know anything

about Katy Perry. But it was the funniest most but like the crazy just kept coming and coming, and I was like, this is the best thing I've ever seen. So anyway, in this universe, you're well aware of Katy Perry and her song Firework, and you're humming it to yourself.

But I'm sitting there reading The New Yorker and I'm engrossed in it and not I don't notice that you get up to go make some nachos, and you come back in, and you catch my attention because you're you're coming back in with some nachos and they smell awesome. And now my attention is directed to you, and you're still humming Firework, right, And I'm like, I was just thinking about that song Firework. I had that in my head.

How crazy we must be connected. I didn't realize that you had been humming it earlier, and beneath my awareness I picked it up. Although once I became aware that you were humming it, it seemed to me like I had ESP. Well, yeah, and that ties into another explanation is that people who do seem to have that gift are just really really hyper observant on minute details, like

the same people that can pick up on micro expressions. Um, they might feel like they have the gift because they're just really in tune to what's going on around them or not just you know, like a big lunk head walking around. So a lot of people who believe in the ESP say, yes, we agree with that, especially parapsychology researchers, and there are still plenty of respected ones out there. Is a guy named darry O Bem. Yeah, I saw that thing. He said. He's been doing this for a

while now legitimately we should talk about him. But there to button up that point, there is UM a lot of parapsychologists or even just plain old psychologists who are researching ESPUM who say, yes, that definitely most likely accounts for almost all of it, and that's good for us to be thinking about that, and that in and of

itself deserves like academic inquiry and research. Right, But there are still some experience experiments that are being produced by guys like Darry Obem that UM are showing some weird results that go beyond this kind of explanation. Yeah. And and one of the problems, well we'll talk about the problems with even this research um about it being reproducible in a second. But he did a couple of experiments. This is from NPR. Crow wrote this, Yeah, from from

from radio LAMB Nice. I didn't know that, um. These are the two that he pointed out. He did nine different experiments, but the two that he highlighted was at Cornell, which is where bim is a does his work. Right. Yeah, and he's again a very respected psychologist, and this study that of these experiments was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is a respected journal. Yeah, um, so they The first one was a computer quiz. They

took a hundred students, fifty males and fifty women, and um. Basically, they showed a computer screen with two little curtains on it, side by side and said, behind one is nothing a brick wall, and behind the other is something sexy. Yeah, some kind of you know, I was about to call it pornographic, but who knows. Maybe it's art erodess. Yeah, gross, Um, that just makes you feel like you're dad saying it or something. Yeah, well, this room too small for you

to say. Um. So basically he would say, you tell me, um, what what you think you're going to see? And they were all hooked up to uh two machines to read the you know, they're what's going on in their body of course, and um, you would think it would be a fifty results, but they actually got a fifty three point one percent result for the what UH craw Witch

calls erotic stimuli. Um. And basically they they think, or at least that's what BEM thinks, is that one possibility is that if there's if they think they're going to see something erotically stimulating, then um, it got passed back through time. Yeah, that's kind of his position, is that

retrocognition thing. Yeah, that they somehow their future selves who saw the erotic image was stimulated enough that that stimulation traveled backwards three seconds and influenced their choice because they were they would be slightly stimulated physiologically right before they guess. And he said, before the computer even chose which which one to show? Right, they right, they were making their choices often correct, Um, before the computer chose to show

an erotic or non erotic image. And it doesn't sound like much, but crow which points out a couple of things. One that um, when there was a control group that was shown just non erotic pictures, they did forty nine eight percent correct, which is chance. They're all not happy, right, They're like, we don't want to be the control They're like,

can we get a little steamier in here? Um? But and he he also pointed out that fifty three point one, to be specific, doesn't sound like much, but um, apparently that's a point two percent chance where on a scale between zero and one, where zero is it's not going to happen, and one is that it's definitely gonna happen. And apparently, as far as um correlation goes, or links between two things something affecting another, a point too is about the same as the link between aspirin and heart

attack prevention. Um, the link between calcium and taken bone mass, the link between second hand smoke and lung cancer. So things that are touted is like, pay attention to this, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So so stuff that we accepted is like, yeah, yeah, if you're around second hand smoke you can get cancer from has the same exactly it is and um. Later on, a meta analysis of Bem's experiments, some other experiments that were carried out afterward, and then some other experiments all

grouped together. A meta analysis showed that um, they they weren't. It wasn't statistically significant if you took all of the existing body of literature of these experiment but it was a New Scientist article, and um, it was pretty cool. In the comments section, somebody said, yeah, it's not reproducible, but a lot of science isn't reproducible. And it reminded me of our scientific method episode where like apparently a lot of um trials that that like pharmaceuticals are based

on aren't reproducible. Wasn't it like them? Which doesn't surprise me of course. Yeah, all right. And then there was this other experiment that I need you to explain to me because I didn't understand it. Okay, you're ready, Like I got the first part, but I didn't. I didn't. It didn't make sense to me because it's a little mind blowing. So you know how like if you are studying something and you write it down, it gets in your brain a little more so that when you're tested

on it later, uh, you will recall it more easily. Yeah, that's a common study method, write something down. So Bem carried out a very simple experiment that did the opposite of that. First, he showed some people a bunch of

a bunch of words, forty eight random words. I think now it's like tree or something like that, and he told them to visualize it though, right, right, So they saw all forty eight words and thought about them, not visualized the letters, but visualized the thing, right, like see the tree, and just just to kind of try to memorize all forty eight words. Then the computer randomly selected twenty four of those words, and then after they'd done that, BEM gave them a test of recall to see how

many they recalled right. So the people I had to type out the the the words they recalled. Then after that, the computer randomly selected twenty four of the forty eight words for the people to type after they had already taken the test of recall. And those twenty four words are the ones that people more consistently got right on

the earlier tests. So it's it's another example of that retroco mission that these people getting the words in their heads after the tests somehow went backward and influenced their recall and memory for the test that they took before they learned them. That makes more sense a little, Yeah, it is a little let's see, time travel melts my brain too, right. So this guy published this stuff in like two thousand and ten, and like it was, it

made a huge, huge splash, huge criticism. The academic journal was criticized, and Ben was you know, pilloried and all that. But he's still you know, put out these these very reproducible, understandable, simple exercises that still showed statistically speaking, there were some

significant results that went beyond chance. So when it comes to debunking UM esp one thing that you're not gonna you know, you said fraud, You're not gonna see a lot of people call researchers outright frauds because that's just sort of a dangerous thing to say. Sure, it's not nice, um, but there are people out there who I guess or criticized for, you know, basically trying to call out UM.

And this is something completely different. But these these on stage psychic shows like crossing Over with John Edwards, Yeah, like it's easy to pick those people out and say you're a big fraud and this is not true of course, And all you're doing is cold reading. Uh cold reading we talked about in the Animal Um Pet Psychics episode. That's basically when you get up on stage and you say, sir, I'm sensing um someone there you're having some trouble with

with another man in your life. Uh with the name of j or or is it h or oh, or maybe it's p Yes, p my my boss, Uh Peter, Yes, yes exactly. And that's all a cold reading is. It's throwing out these really broad things that anyone can latch onto. So it's really easy to call uh, those people out. And there's a guy, um sort of a guy famous for doing that. His name is um James Randy, and he's famous for his offer of one million dollars to anyone that can prove their psychic ability, which of course

no one stepped up to do that. But then he gets pooh pooed a little bit, like you're just making a mockery of trying to legitimately disprove something. And mockery is absolutely the right word. And to me, the presence of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity, right, So, like what you're dealing with then with a guy like that, is uh, a set of beliefs, a belief system running up against another belief system, just like a couple of

religions or something like that. It's not objectivity against fraud or anything like that. It's belief against belief or something. Um And and yeah, the idea of lumping together John Edwards with Darryl bem is just that's, you know, fraudulent in and of itself. Yeah, that's just they call that theatrics, just like the on stage h theatrics of a stage psychic. Yeah, so I believe. I totally agree. Yeah, you know I

I do too. I think there's a definite room for a healthy scientific inquiry into just about anything, whether skeptics believe in it or not. If you can get some funding for it, who cares. That's my motto. You got anything else on ESP? Uh? Let me think? No, I've

got one more thing I found. I came across the I think five Nightline with Ted Coppele, where, Um, the news broke that the CIA had been studying ESP and trying to do remote viewing what Ronson was talking about in The Men Who Stare at Coats when it finally became declassified. In take, coppled like a twenty minute Nightline segment on it totally worth watching. It's some pretty softball questions.

But Robert Gates, who would later become the the head of Defense, he's on there just basically trying as politely as possible to show that he does not believe in any of this. Even so, here's the pharmacy. I a director, and um, it's just neat. Unlus you get to watch Copple again. I miss he was great news man. Yeah, I miss those dudes. I miss. Uh, I was just thinking yesterday about broke call. Yeah, rather I was. I was always a broke coll man. Did you I like

Peter Jennings He was great? Yeah. I don't even all of them were great. I don't even have any idea who does Night in the News now I don't watch it. It was Brian Williams until about a day ago. Did he get fired? He like got I know, the whole kerfuffle, but he didn't get fired. I'm using my ESP to predict that by the time this came, this comes out, he will not be there anymore. I think this is getting big quick interesting. Yeah, Twitter is involved, man, the

Twitter takedown. Uh. If you want them more about ESP, the internet was virtually set up for you to go find out more about it. Um, you can start by typing ESP in the search far at how stuff works dot com. Since I said that it's time for a listener mail, yeah, before we do listener mail, I just want to give a quick shout out to my buddy Isaac McNairy. Uh. If you remember, I did a Judge John Hodgman episode with Emily in which I did a bad home renovation and um, this dude stuff you should know.

Listener from Kansas carpenter. Master carpenter said, hey, man, I'll come and stay with you and help you do your your project. They're right, And I said this sounds crazy, and he actually came and did it and it looks awesome and he's a super cool guy. And if you're in Kansas near Elder Rado, Kansas, there's no better guy to hire of El Dorado, it's Elder Rado. Actually, Okay, he has a point out, but um, not only is he a great carpenter and a cool guy, but he

works with a nonprofit called Outreach Program. Uh and you can find an outreach program dot org where they're basically feeding the world. They package food and they get people together in a room and package these mass quantities of food to send to other countries and feed the hungry. And he's just a really good dude. So thanks to Isaac for that, and my kitchen was looking good. So again for his nonprofit that is Outreach Program dot org. And if you need a great carpenter and you're in Kansas,

check out Retrofit Remodeling. All right, listener, mail, I'm gonna call this pronunciation help. Hey guys, I'm a botanist and just want to throw throw your rope to help you out with pronouncing plant family names. All plant family names end in a C E A E. Oh yeah, I thought we got that wrong. Uh, it is a mess of vowels. Guys, when you read it, you should just imagine you were spelling a C E as in a CE.

So when you read a plant family name, just break off the CE and read the first part and then spell a C. So the plant family for poison oak is uh Ana cardia Anna cardia ce. So it's just Anna cardi A C. I remember it by imagining the aneurysm and cardiac arrest I would have if I fell into it. A N, A C A R D. I what well she spelled out Anna cardi. Oh got the first two uh, first letters from each of those words. Anyway, Guys who love your podcast find it endearing when you too,

puzzle out on pronunciations. Um see see that's good to know. Yeah, so I love you, bunches, And that is from Jane and she said ps. In Europe, they pronounced plant families completely differently. Um other parts see other parts of the US might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is standard in California. Well, okay, what a c C. I You want to let us know something that we should have known before we even recorded, But you're generous enough

with your time and effort to correct us. I guess there's a way to put it. We that was very helpful. Thanks a lot, Jane. If you want to be like Jane in other words, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com, and as always, you can join us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know

dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com