Selects: How ESP Works (?)

Hey guys, it's Josh and for this week's select, I've chosen our twenty fifteen episode on ESP. It's a really good one. We talk about all sorts of things about ESP, including the science, and I know what you're thinking. You're thinking science and ESP. Yes, indeed, and that's one of the things that makes this episode so cool. So I hope you will open your mind, tune in, turn on, drop out, keep on trucking, and enjoy this episode.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there. I didn't even have to look why, I just knew.

Yes, and dudes and dudets. We are in our new studio.

Yeah, can you tell its own different.

It's the very first one and it's tiny.

Wait what do you mean it's the very first one.

Very very first podcast that we've recorded in here.

Oh gotcha?

Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say. I said tiny, but it's not tiny. It's cozy, but it is all all ours, Yeah, al ours.

Everybody else at House Stuff Works doesn't really know that yet, but they will.

Yeah. Because when we actually have butt detection and when someone sits down in these seats that aren't us to get a shock.

Yeah. And plus an alarm goes off at our desks.

Yeah, what's it called dmr TM? 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.

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.

Yep. All we have to do is put up our Aaron Cooper originals. The artwork, got a couple of those waiting together, and we got to work on the lighting in here a little bit.

Yeah.

Jerry's said she's gonna hang some china balls for us. Yeah.

She keeps pushing the china balls.

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. Yeah, kudos for that intro. I'm not going to 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, ESP.

Do you believe in ESP?

No?

No, not at all. Do you 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 predict the future, or 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 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 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 in stuff like that, Yeah, and wanting to go to Duke University to study at their parapsychology department. Did you really believe? Yeah, but you know, believing in ghosts and all this and just that's how I spent my childhood just reading about stuff like that.

Very so Ghostbusters really did a number on you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When that came along, I was like this for me, Yeah, but as an adult, it's not so much that I believe in ESP. It's more that I I refuse to just utterly disbelieve in the possibility of it. Sure, 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 gonna say the sceptic camp because those people just plug me.

Has a bad name, some due to some bad apples. Not all skeptics, No, but there are some that are horses asses. Can we say that?

I don't know. We'll find out, all right, Well, let's talk about And I thought this was interesting because I never knew that ESP is just a big collective term for all manner of par paranormal phenomena. You could also call PSI.

Yeah, and so a dude named jb Ryan who will talk about later.

He coined ESP the Granddaddy.

And then in the forties another guy coined the term PSI and PSI is a Greek letter and it's equated with psyche or the soul ps i. And the reason that the guy chose PI is because he felt ESP suggested it was something supernatural. Yeah, sure, and SI he felt suggested that this is a normal part of humanity. We just don't understand it.

It sounds like science, right. But there are several categories of ESP, and this is the one that 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 a telep right. Clairvoyance, which is the ability to see events or things objects happening somewhere else at the same time. So are you doing are you clairvoyant?

I am. I'm seeing your couch right now and I'm seeing 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 a logical assumption.

Okay. Then we have our pre cogs precognition, that's when you see into the future, retrocogs retro cognition. You can see into the distant past.

That's there's another that's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition. Yeah, like seeing you know, cave like TikTok running around with the dinosaurs like you do, which I guess never would have happened. Yeah, 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, yeah, affects your past. And an example given is that you have a dream

All right. Then you have your mediumship and that's miss Cleo who can channel dead spirits.

Yeah, I forgot about her.

And then you heard.

How much money that woman grossed in the nineties.

She made a lot of dough, 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 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.

All right. And then you have a psychometry, which is the ability to read info about a person place by touching the person no object. And that's what I like to call the dead zone. Right, Christopher Walkin, 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, that is such a good movie.

Yeah, it really is good, Chris Walkin.

There's another one, Chuck called telekinesis, which is like Uri Geller stroking a spoon in it bending right, like being able to manipulate matter just using a light touch of your mind.

But there is no spoon. Yeah.

Wasn't that from Matrix?

All right? So basically, like you said, jb Ryan is the granddaddy of all this, and he actually started studying. I mean, he was a legitimate scientist. He wasn't some quack. And this was in the nineteen thirties where he started at Duke University studying para parapsychology basically.

And he wasn't the first. He was one of the first laboratory experimenters in academia to really study SAI. Right before him, probably about forty or so years before him, William James and some of his pals at the Society for Psychical Research really laid the groundwork for applying the scientific method to the study of paranormal phenomenonah, and they did two things. They outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like very famously Madame Bleovartsky. But then they also investigated ones

What was Madame Blevartsky Steele of the Cony?

She was she actually she was almost a cult leader, you could argue she was. She she created Oh man, it's called like theodism, I think, huh, which is it was? It was almost a cult. It was a huge 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 there, holding hands in the circle and

Did you see The Source Family, by the way, that documentary. No, I haven't about the La cult in the seventies.

I saw the icon on Netflix and never clicked as a.

Good it's really good and it's it's awesome. Actually, I recommend everyone see. It's one of those where 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 La Yeah, yeah, right in Hollywood.

There was one in There was a documentary I saw about a cult in Miami and they were like super fundamentalist Christian but they also were the basis of their religion 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 did. They had a band though, and.

The called the Source M.

You know, I can't remember the name of the band, but it's pretty interesting.

To Manhattan Transfer.

Yeah, that was. It's a really good documentary that it's just funny to see how these people now they're like, it was awesome. Yeah, I had a lot of sex and smoked a lot of weed.

Yeah, that's kind of what got hurt too. They these guys didn't seem to have a lot of sex though. They were like real like compartmentalized gender wise, like male dominance and all that. But they just smoked a ton of pot all the time, including their little kids. Oh well, that's not good, like like four year old smoking.

Oh that's terrible.

Yeah, it was in the documentary. It's worse seeing I don't remember what you.

Had me up. You lost me there.

I lost everybody there in that documentary.

Yeah. All right, So back to this ESP thing. Jb Ryan Yeah, jb Ryan, Well, basically, there's a there's a lot of different outlooks on what ESP might be. Some people think that everyone's got it, but some people it just pops up every now and then, like I might have a dream that comes true or whatever. Other people think that only certain people have it, they have the gift as they say, uh, and that they have to be in this special like you know, mental state to

Right, and you fall into none of those three camp Yes, So we'll talk a little more about some ideas of what ESP is right after this. So, Chuck, you said that basically how people see ESP is either everyone has it, some people have it, or no one has it. Basically, whether you're a skeptic or a believer. If you are a believer in ESP and somebody comes to you and says, okay, explain ESP, like what is it, there's actually a couple of very common suggestions or proposals.

Yeah.

One made sense for a while before we knew a little more about the brain, and that was that ESP 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 basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves through time or there. It didn't pick up on some special part of your brain that receives this message.

And there was a did you see that study I sent you? That was I think from twenty ten where they put people in an MRI and then showed them different pictures or whatever, and they did they showed like, I put you in the Wonder machine and now I'm showing you a picture of the flower and that's it.

Okay, it's lovely, except it sounds like a German rave.

Okay, a little bit. But that would be 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, I think about it and send you the thought of that flower. So you're getting ESP stimuli and then non ESP stimuli. And from the MRI they showed that the brain didn't react differently.

Gotcha.

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, I Emily's over there, My first guess is gonna be dog every time, and it's flower.

And then well, it wasn't about guessing. It was just to see, like showing you the ESP version, right, and then the non ESP version of the same thing. So you weren't guessing, do you understand?

Yeah, I get it. No, I would have guessed dog or wine.

There wasn't guessing, That's what I guessed.

Emily thinks she has a gift a little bit, so she would have been disappointed. She's got the shin Yeah, a little, she thinks. Yeah, But I think she is just super observant and intuitive.

But that's definitely one explanation for it.

Yeah, which we'll get to of course. So these days there are other theories, one of which is that it's called spillover, that there's basically another dimension that that doesn't you know, have our laws here and our dimension, and that sometimes stuff just sort of spills over from that and we see the future or the past.

Yeah, And if you're a skeptic, you probably just pull the decent size 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 and of course they'll say it exactly. Yeah, you know.

Yeah, And I think I got the impression from this article that they were making that point, like science is just chasing its tail and trying to explain ESP because

Yeah, And that just flies in the face of all we know about electromagnetic.

Rights exactly, no good, right, So there's a lot of things wrong with the proposals of what ESP is.

Yeah, but you know, the reason why still 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 at the gift exactly where it popped up in me, you know, briefly at least.

And there's a I mean, there's a lot of evidence of a strange and unusual occurrences, sure that support the idea of ESP.

Yeah.

This article gives a really good one about an eighteen ninety eight book called Futility.

Yeah, 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, yeah, 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 eighteen ninety eight and if that sounds familiar. The Titanic did the same exact thing, the Titanic, not the titan Yeah, did the same exact thing fourteen years later.

Yeah, if there are a bunch of similarities. The titan 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.

And the starless night.

I don't know about that, Okay. They were both said to be unsinkable. 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,

It is interesting and it's amazing coincidence, and it focuses the attention and captures the imagination. 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.

Esp th Yeah, is that true or is that just been added?

I'm sure it was added over the years, Okay. Which is a big problem with this kind of anecdotal evidence is that you know, it gets embellished in urban Yeah, exactly. And 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. So back to Ryan, he did some like I said, in the nineteen thirties, he started studying the stuff with one of my favorite inventions by his colleague Carl Zenner. Of course, if you've seen Ghostbusters he was using. He was using a version of Zenner cards. The shapes weren't all exactly. I think there was one that was different in Ghostbusters, but the original Xenner cards were.

Like water a river?

Is that what that is?

Maybe?

Okay? And the idea is that, just like in Ghostbusters, you hold it up and 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, sure, so that the other person, the target, the receiver, can pick it up telepathically.

Yeah, and I did they have these online. I took the test yesterday and I went through the twenty five deck and I only got six out of twenty five. And at the end it just said you are not a psychic.

Oh really?

Yeah, I thought it 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 would chance be?

I guess chance would be if there's five different ones.

To be twenty percent, and so this was six of twenty four would be it? No, that's less.

Yeah, No, you did six of twenty four. So you did twenty four or twenty five twenty five, so five of twenty 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.

Oh, I've got the gift, right, but I.

Didn't know, Like it's randomly generated, 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 evidence that when a machine is involved, Yeah, there is

Like a random number generators.

Yes, yeah, So Princeton University has a department called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Department PAIR, right, of course, and Pair has been doing studies for a couple of decades. They've done 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 the you're okay.

That makes like 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 has on a random number generator. Come on, it's on Princeton's website. And this is stuff that like is apparently accepted in the in the scientific community that 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 it's significant.

Well, Ryan with his inner card experiments in the thirties did find that some people got what they thought were pretty impressive results, 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 remember how you got three in a row and you were like, oh my god, Yeah, he got twenty five in a row once? What twenty five? Come on, No, I'm not kidding. He was also documented as selecting five hundred and fifty eight correct out of eighteen hundred and fifty which is the odds of that happening by chain. Yeah, we're twenty two billion to one.

Now, were these the early experiments because okay, because I did read that and this seems like I can't believe he didn't check this, but apparently the early cards were a little translucent. Oh really, yeah, some of them were. And then he corrected for that and the and the percentages went down. And then they, I know, other scientists said that you are somehow influencing with your body tell right, like you basically you don't have a good enough poker vase.

Yeah. In the earliest Ryan experiments with the xener cards, he would hold the card up and go and he'd be making eye contacts right the guy. Yeah, The guesser would be like, is it the wavy line? Yeah, he started shaking his head almost in perseent, but he uh he. That's called sensory leakage, where you the person who is holding the card and knows who the card is. Yeah, somehow there's some detail about your face that when you do a thousand trials with somebody, yeah, they start to

Ah. Yes, as a German gunsfeld that means whole field in German, and that is when they started putting people, they would start depriving their other senses. Basically, right, 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 special glasses.

Or ping pong balls cut in half like Kermit the Frog.

I guess later on they said, we should just make some glasses.

Exactly, We've got the funding.

So basically the idea was, let's rule out any uh any of that gross sensory leakage.

Yeah, which he so apparently. Later on in Ryan's experiments, after he started controlling for stuff, the percentages started to drop of correct guesses. He was also he's generally a respected researcher for a couple of reasons. One, whenever he did whenever evidence of like some sort of bias or fraud or something was brought to him, he corrected for it.

Yeah, he wore glasses and a white coat, right.

That was another one. But also he was daring enough to stake his entire career on a field of study that will get anybody mocked publicly privately, 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 rather than just walking away from it.

Yeah, I don't think he was like, I really want to prove this is true?

Was he?

Yes, he did that.

That was a huge criticism of him. He got you was a definite believer. 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 people he suspected were purposefully getting things wrong because they didn't like him to mess with his data. He just took those and

Right.

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. 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 I guess the sensor 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,

All right, Well, right after this break, we'll talk a little bit about what skeptics say about ESB. All right, Josh. One thing you'll hear skeptics say a lot is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I have to agree with them. Yeah, And it is an extraordinary claim here, and so far

I have a great example of that, man. Okay, it happened this very morning. What yeah, I did. I was at the printer. You know, we just moved offices, and I was at the printer and I had like an extra pizza 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 is like, what kind of office would I.

Right, we just said we have a fifty five gallon drum that we throw stuff into that it catches on fire.

Yeah, and then we send it out.

We have a burning drum, that's what it's called.

Now we're getting those soon.

Right, And we are getting them soon. I know this because on my way back to my desk, I popped into Izzy, the it guy who's also the head of all recycling and stuff here. I was like, Izzy, we 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 Izzy impression.

Yeah, it was close, and so, like I thought about it, that's pretty amazing. Yeah, you know, but it was about nine in the morning, and this is a company wide email, so it would be something that Izzy would probably knock out about that time.

Yeah.

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. And so there's all these different, really overlooked variables or factors to this whole thing 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

Yeah, you know what used to happen to me now that I think of it is I used to and this it's weird. It was only with phone landlines. It hadn't happened with the cell phone. But I used to like know the phone was going to ring right before it rang. Oh yeah, like almost go to reach for it. And I mean it's not like it happened all the time, but it happened enough times where I was like, oh, that's weird.

Sure, I know what you're talking about.

But that was all it was to me. I was not like I have the gift.

Well think about it in that respect too. You know fifteen twenty people. So was it you knew who was calling or just that the phone was about.

To run now just that it was about to ring.

Oh yeah, that is weird. You definitely do have.

Esp yeah, 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. Yeah, but only subconsciously, you know.

Well, that's another explanation for it. That, right, that there is 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

Yeah, and you know what now to 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 yeah, I think you meant like a click.

And it wasn't even the newer model. This was back in the day when it was yeah, a ringing like bell. Sure, so maybe that does explain it.

Yeah. I've got another good example that I came across from researching this. Let's say that you and I are hanging out, yeah, and you're humming a Baby on the fire work, right, just over and over again. I don't know that song, but I'm reading Yes you do, No, I don't, Yeah you do it? Was it Katy Perry? I don't know Katy Perry anyway.

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?

It was thin?

They were really significant.

She looked like she worked at corn Dog on a Stick.

I don't know what that is that' thought all corn dogs are on sticks.

It's that place in the Hot Dog on a stick, that place in the mall where they were those big giant Yeah. No, I don't know anything about Katy Perry, but it was the funniest most 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

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. 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 like a big lunkhead walking around.

So a lot of people who believe in ESP say, yes, we agree with that, especially parapsychology researchers, and there are still plenty of respected ones out there. There's a guy named Darryl Bem.

Yeah, I saw that thing you sent. He's been doing this for a while now.

Yeah, legitimately we should talk about him. But to button up that point, there is a lot of parapsychologists or even just plain old psychologists who are researching ESP, yeah, 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 it self

Yeah. And one of the problems, well, we'll talk about the problems with even this research about it being reproducible in a second. But he did a couple of experiments. This is from NPR.

Akroll which wrote this. Oh really, yeah, from from from Radio Lab.

Nice. I didn't know that 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. So they The first one was a computer quiz. They took a hundred student it's fifty males and fifty women, and 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 nakednessism.

Yeah, gross, This just make you feel like your dad saying it or something.

Yeah, well, this room's too small for you to say. So basically he would say, you tell me what you think you're going to see, and they were all hooked up two machines to read the you know, they're what's going on in their body, of course, and you would think it would be a fifty to fifty result, but they actually got a fifty three point one percent result

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, before the computer chose to show an erotic or non erotic image. And fifty three percent it doesn't sound like much, but Krolwitch points out a couple of things. One that when there was a control group that was shown non eurotic pictures. Yeah, they did forty nine point eight percent correct, which is chance.

And they're fifty to fifty and they're all not happy, right, They're like, I don't want to be the control.

They're like, can we get a little steamier in here? But and he also pointed out that fifty three fifty three point one, to be specific, doesn't sound like much, but 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

So things that are touted is like, pay attention to.

This, yesh, yeah, yeah exactly. So stuff that we accept is like, yeah, yeah, if you're around second and smoke, you can get cancer from that. This is probably has the same exactly, yeah it is. And 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 they weren't. It wasn't statistically significant if you took all of the existing body

Yeah, 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. It didn't make sense to.

Me because it's a little mind blowing.

Yeah.

So you know how like if you are studying something, sure, and you write it down, Yes, it gets in your brain a little more.

Yeah.

Yeah, so that when you're tested on it later, you will recall it more easily.

Yeah, that's a common study method. Write something down okay.

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 noun's like tree or something like that.

Yeah, 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.

You're yeah, just just to kind of try to memorize all forty eight words.

Yeah.

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, Yes, So the people had to type out 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'd already taken the test of recall. And those twenty four words are the ones that people more consistently got right on the earlier tests.

Oh okay, So.

It's another example of that retrocognition that these people getting the words in their heads after the test somehow went backward and influenced their recall and memory. Gocha for the test that they took before they learned them.

That makes more sense a little. Yeah, it is a little, but see time travel melts my brain too. Right.

So this guy published this stuff in like twenty ten, and like it was, it made a huge, huge splash, huge criticism. The Act Demic Journal was criticized and bem was you know, pillar eat 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 ESP one thing that you're not gonna you know, you said fraud, You're not going to 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, but there are people out there who I guess are criticized for, you know, basically trying to call out 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. Cold reading we talked about in the Animal Pet Psychics episode, Right, that's basically when you get up on stage and you say, sir, I'm sensing someone there. You're having some trouble with another man in your life with a name of j or or is it h or O P or maybe it's P. Yes P, my boss Peter. Yes, yes, exactly. And that's

And mockery is absolutely the right word. Yeah, And to me, the presence of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity.

Yeah.

So like what you're dealing with then, with a guy like that, is 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. 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 theatrics of a stage psychic. Yeah, so I totally agree.

Yeah, you know, 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.

Sure, if you can get some funding for it, who cares. That's my motto.

You got anything else on ESP, let me think. No, I've got one more thing I found. I came across the nineteen ninety i think five Nightline with Ted Copple, Yeah, where the news broke that the CIA had been studying ESP and trying to do remote viewing what Ronson was talking about and the men who stare at goats?

Oh yeah, John.

When it finally became declassified in nineteen ninety five, Ted Copple did like a twenty minute Nightline segment on it. Totally worth watching. It's some pretty softball questions.

Yeah.

Robert Gates, who would later become the head of Defense. Yeah, he's on there just basically trying as politely as possible to show that he does not believe in any of this, even though he was the Formacia director. And it's just neat.

Plus you get to watch Copple again, right, he was great news man. Yeah, I miss those dudes. I miss I was just thinking yesterday about Brokaw.

Yeah, rather I was.

I was always a Brokaw man.

Did you I liked Peter Jennings he was great.

Yeah.

I don't even know all of them were great.

I don't even have any idea who does nightly 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 for it.

Did. I'm using my esp to predict that by the time this came this comes out, who will not be there anymore? Wow, I think this is getting big quick interesting.

Yeah. Twitter's involved, man, the Twitter takedown.

Yeah. Uh. If you want to know more about ESP. The internet was virtually set up for you to go find out more about it. You can start by typing ESP in the search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com. Since I said that it's time for listener mail.

Yeah, before we do listener mail, I just want to give a quick shout out to my buddy Isaac McNairy. If you remember, I did a Judge John Hodgman episode with Emily in which I did a bad home renovation and 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 there right And I said this sounds crazy, and he actually came and did it and it looks awesome and he's

Nice.

All right, listener mail to call this pronunciation help. Hey guys, I'm a botanist and just wanted to throw throw you a 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 I got that wrong.

It is a mess of vowels. Guys. When you read it, you should just imagine you were spelling ace as in acee. So when you read a plant family name, just break off A the acee and read the first part and then spell acee. So the plant family for poison oak is Anacardia anacardi a ce. So it's just Anna cardi a ce. 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 gotcha the first two

Ace A, see, that's good to know.

Yeah, so I love you, bunches and that is from Jane, and she said ps. In Europe they pronounce plant families completely differently other parts of see. Other parts of the US might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is standard in California.

Oh well, okay, what ac ac If 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. Sure we That was very helpful. Thanks a lot, Jane. If you want to be like Jane in other words, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.

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