Let's imagine none of this is true. We're still going to learn something about why people have out of body experiences, or think they're in telepathic contact with their loved ones, or go to a medium and think they've contacted the dead. We're going to learn something interesting about psychology. And that's true of magic. You know, when you study magicians and how they manipulate attention and all sorts of other things, you're learning about psychology, and people are fascinated by this stuff.
What psychologists are really good at, academic psychologists is taking people who I find very interesting in our lives and emotions, and we love and we hate, and we have beliefs that aren't true, and we argue with people and we get on with people, and so taking all of that buzzing complexity and reducing it to something really quite dull, and so that saddens me. And a lot of my work is about trying to celebrate the role of people in society and keep psychology interesting. I mean, that's why
I got into it in the first place. You know, I read these things, and yet psychologists have this rather uncanny ability to take something as interesting and convert into something quite dull.
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. I'm doctor Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist interested in the science of intelligence, creativity and human potential. Today we have doctor Richard Wiseman on the podcast. Doctor Wiseman holds Britain's only professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and has published over one hundred academic papers examining the psychology of magic and illusion, deception, luck, and self development.
Doctor Wiseman has written several popular psychology books, including The Luck Factor, Paranormality, Why We See What Isn't There, Quircology, Shoot for the Moon and Rip It Up, The Radically New Approach to Changing Your Life. I've been a longtime admirer of doctor Wiseman's wide ranging research on magic, well being and success in life. As you will see in this episode, we share a lot of mutual interests. I really enjoyed chatting with doctor Wiseman, and I know you
will enjoy listening to our discussion. So that further ado I bring you Doctor Richard Wiseman, Professor Richard wise Man. It is so so good to have you on the Secondlogy Podcast.
Finally pleasure, pleasure to be here, and greetings from and not very sunny Edinburgh in Scotland, which is where I find myself.
It's not sunny, but I do love Edinburgh.
I love it. It's a very very beautiful city and I'm lucky enough to live right in the middle of it. So yeah, yeah. Every year the Fringe Festival rolls into town and thousands of shows all over the city. But right now it's a fairly quiet time, particularly as it's quite late at night.
Wonderful. Well, we have so many areas of mutual interest. I have a great and rest in magic and a great interest. I see you on the Facebook groups I'm on, you know, and I'm like, oh, there's Richard. You know the magic the secret magic groups. Won't mention what any of them are called.
Yes, yes, the interconnected world of magic. Yes, the small world. It's incredible, it's it is.
It is remarkably small, and everyone's trying to, you know, make sure that we keep the secrets, keep the secrets. But also psychology and the psychology of success. That's a very very common area of interest. Not common, that's a mutual area of interest of ours. Is the maybe some of the unexpogant talk today about some of some unexpected things that people, you know, might not realize really matters
for success. And maybe we'll talk about some of the things that everyone says matters for success and maybe it doesn't matter so much. So that'd be great to have that conversation. So that's that's all, just uh preamble, you know, just setting the stage, setting the stage.
Letting people know what's going to happen.
Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. Well you're you're you're a lifelong entertainer. So I want to start there a little bit to your childhood, because you were a street performer when you were what twelve, no.
A little bit older than that. I got into magic when I was probably eight or nine something like that, and by my grandfather, who showed me a very good magic trick. Hearly knew one magic trick, but it's a very good one. A coin that would disappear and appear in a nest of boxes. And so I kind of badgered him every weekend to just tell me how this trick was done. He wouldn't do that. Eventually, he said
the secrets in the local library. So I went and read everything about magic and That's how I got hooked on it, and it is an amazing hobby. I mean, I've just written a book on all the kind of benefits of learning magic, and they are sizable, you know, in terms of confidence, in terms of problem solving, getting a can do attitude, and so on. So I got into magic, got into a local magic club, and then
went to study psychology because of magic. Actually, I read a book that said, as handed magicians are likable and so therefore you should read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Doubt Canigi, which is an amazing book. I mean it's it's dated now, but it's incredible. That and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living his other book,
both of them incredible. So I read those then when I studied psychology at University College London, which is right in the middle of London, and the reason for that is that it's very close to the Magic Circle and also very close to Covent Garden, which is an area in London where all the street entertainers are, and so in my summer breaks I would go and do street entertaining down there. I guess they're in my sort of
early teens, and I was pretty awful. I was pretty bad at it's it's a hard way of making a living because people can walk off, you know, they don't like what you're doing, They just they wander off, and they did in large numbers when I was doing street entertaining. So I did that. And then I mean, we'll talk about sort of as you say, success, but in terms of opportunity. You know, most of the opportunities that have
come my way have been by chance. And so at the end of my degree, I was walking along my friend was walking in the opposite direction and bumped into him and he said, you know, that's the weirdest thing. I've just seen this poster for a pH d position, which would be perfect for you studying the psychology of
magic up in Edinburgh. And I often think, well, you know, if that somebody hadn't put that post up, or he hadn't walked that route, or I hadn't walked the route and bumped into him, I wouldn't have known about that opportunity. This is all prior to email and so on and the web. And so this was a professor up in Edinburgh who's doing work on the paranormal wanted a magician and so I came up to here and studied psychology
and magic for four years. That's my pH d. And then after that went back down to the University of Hertfordshire and did some of the research which a spect you may I read about. So that that's my kind of career in terms of magic and psychology coming together.
I love it. What was the name of your advisory.
Up here is Professor Robert Morris who was the Curseler Professor of parapsychology. So Bob was. I don't think he believed in paranormal stuff or not. He's certainly very open to it, but he also knew that lots of the psychics and mediums and so on were cheats, and he wanted someone to do some work on psychology and magic so he could sort of separate the two outs. And what was amazing about that experience, I was working in a parapsychology unit, which is the psychology of the paranormal. Now,
I'm skeptical about that stuff, most tragicians are. I was deeply skeptical, and you I was surrounded by people who kind of believed that stuff. And I think it's very healthy to be working an area and to meet people whose belief systems you don't share, because it kind of teaches you how to be tolerant and respectful when you don't agree with somebody. So it set me in a
good kind of stead for that. So yeah, that was Bob Morris up here, and that was four glorious years doing psychology and magic stuff.
That's so cool. I feel like the psychology of the paranormal is a very fringe area of psychology. When I go to the APA conferences, I just don't meet many paranormal psychologists.
That's definitely true. Yeah, probably. I mean I was doing it's probably about fifty people. Now there's probably about twenty people around the world. So yes, it's not an area that attracts many people.
It's not an area that attracts many people. Yet, Like, if there is something to this, then like it's like the most important thing. That's the interesting thing about this is like it's you know, it's the most fringe area. But let's say a psychologist does someday actually find something that replicates within the parent because yeah, no one's replicating this shit. Well let's say soone actually replicates. Well, then it's like wait a minute, hold on, maybe we should now focus on this.
Yeah, now that that's true, it has the opportunity or the possibility of revolutionizing exactly obviously the mind and so on. But you do need evidence, good evidence. I don't believe the evidence is there for extrasensory perception. But Bob's argument, even back then, this would have been the late eighties, early nineties, his argument was, I think it's true. Let's
imagine none of this is true. We're still going to learn something about why people have out of body experiences or think they're in telepathic contact with their loved ones, or go to a medium and think they've contacted the dead. We're going to learn something interesting about psychology. And that's true of magic. You know, when you study magicians and how they manipulate attention and all sorts of other things, you're learning about psychology, and people are fascinated by this stuff.
What psychologists are really good at, academic psychologists is taking people who I find very interesting in our lives and emotions, and we love and we hate, and we have beliefs that aren't true, and we argue with people and we get on with people, and so taking all of that buzzing complexity and reducing it to something really quite dull, and so that saddens me. And a lot of my work is about trying to celebrate the role of people in society and keep psychology interesting. I mean, that's why
I got into it in the first place. You know, I read these things, and yet psychologists have this rather uncanny ability to take something as interesting and converting into something quite dull.
Well, you're so right. I mean, you're the literally, you're the professor of public understanding at your university. Yes, yes, and uh, you know, like you literally I've never heard of that, but maybe Richard Dawkins the only other time I ever heard of someone who was a professor of like public you know, why the public should care about something, and.
Him Richard started he was public understanding science, I think, and then when I got my professorship, I went with public understanding of psychology because it allows me to move in many different spheres. But also, you know, fundamentally, people should be so honored and excited to study psychology. When I first speak to undergraduates on their first day in
the university, they're all excited. And then when you speak to them in year three or year four, they've kind of lost that excitement and it's all become a little bit dull. And I think that's because psychology is quite a lot of it isn't very interesting. So I always think we should remember why we're doing this stuff, and how wonderful, you know, how wonderful brains are, how wonderful minds are. We've got no idea how the brain creates
the mind. We don't really have very much an idea of how brains work, and we're still only scratching the surface in terms of the complexity and getting our heads around that. So yeah, I always sort of choose topics that I find interesting and I think other people will find interesting. For that reason, I don't do much work on, you know, short term memory, because I would find it difficult to bring that live.
But you did write a book on helping people with their memory memory.
I forgot about that. Yes, that's eronic crazy, yes, so, yeah, a short book on memory. But again, it was about how to improve your memory, right, Well, it wasn't about you know, the intricacies of how memories long.
Term Well, exactly, that's right, that's it. Well, I know I find the well, I definitely find the topics study interesting for sure. I remember, it's just a shame in psychology that we don't in grad school promote people more or encourage encouraged students who want to do public outreach
of their science. When I was in grad school, I started blogging for Psychology Today, right when that blog network started, and my advisor called me into his office and he's like, we need to talk, like, you know, this is really you're really out there, you know, in this department for doing this, and you realize this is going to hurt your your chances at tenure, and and you know, it turns out he was right, But I mean that was.
True of me. When I finished by parapsychology stuff in ninety two, I was looking for a job. It turns out nobody wants to employ a parapsychologist or something that's done to work. And so it is that that is totally true that the system is set up for a certain type of psychology. Were publish in certain types of journals and get certain types of grant and if you're going to sit outside of that, it can be quite challenging. But you know that the key question to me is, well,
why are you're doing anything? Quite frankly, what makes something meaningful? And when you ask that psychologist, their answer is, well, because I published journal articles and I get grants. That's the end point. The end point isn't to understand or to celebrate humanity. And so the number of times people are confused when you go, well, let's just forget about
the articles and the why are you studying this? And people just psychologists look kind of a bit bewilled and go, I'm just doing it because that's to get those publications, get those grants, and that's how you get on. So yeah, I think it'd be nice if there was a dramatic change in my lifetime of encouraging people to think about why they're doing what they're doing and what is meaningful?
Well, that would be nice, wouldn't that be nice? Yeah, well, sign me up for that. That that club I view you as part of a tradition of that includes James Randy, the Amazing Randy, and includes Banacheck. And but it's it's a it's a smaller club than that because you're a psychologist who was formerly I mean, they I put you in this sort of tradition because they you know, James Randy tried to test to see some of those bullshit,
but he didn't really do rigorous double blind me for TV. Look, I'm going to show you how I'm smarter than you. You know that you're dumb, that you wired and that. Look, I'm the amazing Randy. But with all due respect, I have a lot of respect for him. But that's what the TV show is about.
Yeah, no, I'm not quite the same as that.
I mean, look at me.
Yeah right, yeah, I mean I suppose in terms of going back, I'd probably close to Ray him and Jim Orcock people like that who were and still are doing that kind of work within psychology. We should say, though, Randy who and I knew James very well. You know, it was an amazing guy. I mean, it was the amazing Randy. But he's amazing in many many ways. And one is he just very charismatic, very clear thinking, very bright, and had a great ability to take skepticism and make
it exciting on the media. And that is not an easy thing to do. I mean, it's more exciting to talk about why ghosts are real than why they may not exist. But James could bring that alive. You know that famous line of people prefer the bunk to the d bunk where he was able to overcome that. And he was great, and some of these investigations are very brave as well. He went after people that he knew were going to kind of come back at him. So yeah, he was a good, big, big fan of his work.
Banichick is wonderful as well, really talented. Have you ever seen Banichick doing the spoon bending, which I saw in Vegas a few years ago. My goodness, it's really good. It's really really good. But yeah, you are right. My roots, I suppose, because they're in academia, will be closer to people like Ray him and Jim l Kock who'd come more from that that kind of tradition.
And I was very careful and what I said, because I could have easily just put you in the camp of, oh, you come from the tradition of Daryl Bem But I don't feel like you come from the tradition of Daryl in a sense in a sense because in one sense, yes, because you're both rigorous scientists, right, But another sense is that I feel like you're even more critical of it, of it than he is.
But yeah, I mean, Darre's not particularly critical. Now, I mean, he starts off, I think, being quite skeptical. He's very good magician. It was actually taught I think by Slodini, and does some great magic. Yeah, I think, I think, yeah, I think that's right. Certainly I've seen him do Sladini, which we should explain to people is a very particular type of magic. I've seen him do those those those
sorts of routines. And Darrell's great published main parapsychological papers suggesting there was something to it in mainstream journals and inadvertently kicked off the current crisis in replication in psychology because people looked at those articles started to criticize his research, saying, oh, well, you know, maybe he looked at the data pre analyzed it,
or he's not reporting everything, or whatever it is. And then other people went old on a minute, that may be true of that parapsychological work, but it's also true of a lot of psychology as well, And so that kicked off this whole kind of we need to be able to replicate and need to look critically our own studies, And now that's become a huge movement, and because of that movement, psychologists now are talking about a thing called preregistration,
which is where you write down what you're going to do, the way in which you're going to analyze data, and so on before you conduct the study. And the full circle on it is that parapsychologists were doing that for fifteen years many many years ago, I mean pro twenty years ago. Now they ran those sorts of systems because they knew there were problems with the data. So it's another way to which parapsychology can kind of overlap with psychology.
Yeah, just on a nerdy note, pregistration is kind of like mentalism. I mean, aren't they making a prediction? We predict this will be our hypothesis.
Correct, that's right, yes, But unlike mentalism, it's quite hard to change that prediction. So so so yeah, it's an attempt to kind of sort if it.
Was right, If it goes right, you know it looks impressive.
You make a big fuss, that's right. Yes, yeah, yeah, So Daryl contributed to that. And actually, weirdly, there's another overlap there because before you go into parapsychology, Darrel was doing stuff on self perception theory, which is this notion that you figure out how you feel by looking at how you're acting. So it's this idea that if you force your face into a smile, then you cheer yourself up because you look at yourself. I think I'm smiling, I must be happy. And he did some great work
on that, quite early work. And then one of my books was about entirely about self perception theory, the rip it Up Book, or called the Asif Principle and states. So I interviewed Daryl for that when I did that book. It was odd talking to him entirely about that and not about parapsychology because that's not viewing. But no, it is great.
Have you ever talked to him about parents because you're a rep You have a study right that found it didn't replicate. Weren't an author on that at Cothora?
Well yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we didn't replicate stuff. No, I've spoken to Daryl and we did summer schools together in America on parapsychology, so I know him reasonably well. And yeah, this is what I mean. We within parapsychology. I don't see eye to i with most parapsychologists in terms of whether this stuff is true. But you have to sit down the room and have a conversation with somebody without shouting. And that's a that's a useful skill.
I mean, we all know about confirmation bias. We love to surround ourselves with people that agree with us. And I mean talking going back to success. I know I'm not going to name them. I know two very very famous magicians and I went to see their shows, and I go and see them, see them afterwards. I'm not gonna say who is. I'm not gonna say who is? Uh and uh. Each of them said to me, what do you think of the show? And so there's always this tradition that you say nice things about someone's show.
And I said, I enjoyed this, and both of them cut me dead. I said, never mind about that. What did you hate? What can I change tomorrow? And that they were at the top of their game, and all they're interested in is what can I change? How can I improve? And it's an odd skill. It's it's something that we don't embrace easily as saying to somebody, yeah, but how can I get how to get better? What do you disagree with about what I'm what I'm doing?
Not what do you agree with? We all want to be surrounded by people that go, oh, you're wonderful, you're great. Actually you learn far more from the people that go yeah, not for me. So that was always an important lesson.
Well, then that's an importent lesson and about success. I mean, and if you look at anyone who's really successful, you look at like even you know, things basketball players. I feel like that was Kobe Bryant's mentality. You know, it's like, you know, they always wanting to change and improve.
It's hard to do, though. It's easy to say.
It's hard to do.
And I've done shows. You meet people afterwards and you love it when they go, oh my goodness, that was great and that was funny. It's really hard to go, yeah, yeah, what what didn't you like? What didn't you What can I do better? It's hard to do. It's easy to say and hard to do.
It's true, especially the more personal The comment is yeah, you know totally, yeah, no, for sure. So where are we at with the evidence on this? So I try to look at you know, I started with your ninety nine paper, Does s I exist? P s I? How's it pronounced?
A SI?
Yeah? Yeah? Does SI exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer. I saw your eyes by the way, trying to think all the way back to ninety nine that this.
Happens a lot. Okay, what what's about to happen? Happens a lot now, which is somebody asked me the other day about a book that I'd written, and it was I'd written in the kind of mid nineties, and I was thinking, I can't remember, and I you know, I don't even I don't even remember writing the book the contents of it. So yeah, particularly with papers like that, but I do remember that that was that's the metro analysis again.
The studies, Just in case you forgot, I wrote a sentence from the abstract. The studies failed to confirm his mean effect of participants scoring above chance on the ESP task. So you looked at a whole bunch of Now that that was before the bemuh, the big the one that made the big splash, right, which was more recent.
No, I think that is.
Oh was that was that? Oh? That was maybe that was that was a direct replication of that.
Now now we are getting in stuff I can't remember. So I thought that paper that you got there, well, what's the title of it again?
Does side exist lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer.
That's the metro analysis all, okay stuff. Yeah, the the BEM stuff is about feeling the future, which is was much later on, so later that was about again, yes, that's right. So that one I think I'm right is about meta analysis where you put lots of studies together and when we put them together, we found a kind of null effect. And then there's lots and lots of endless debate about that paper. I think it's still one of my most cited papers because so many people have
disagreed with it and got to arguments about it. So it's a very contentious paper. And actually one of the reasons why I left the field. I don't do much parasitology now because it was so unpleasant to be consistently opening your email and as criticism and argument, and I was going to conferences and arguing about it, and after a while I was just thinking, I don't really want
to spend my entire life arguing about this stuff. And then that's where I moved into the luck work and some of the more sort of positive aspects of change. Because after about ten twelve years in parapsychology. I thought I'd said everything I needed to say, and you know, like literally, these beliefs really do matter to some people. And so the debates do get quite heated sometimes it does.
And you know, there are such a part the worry right now of the telepathy tapes, and I want to get that.
Yeah, don't know about them other than yeah, I haven't listened to them or anything like that. But isn't it amazing that this stuff, you know, that the unsinkable rubber duck hypothesis. You know, you keep on batting it down, it keeps on coming back in different forms.
Yeah, well you do keep batting it down. You took on their gangs felts. Can you just describe the methodology of a gangs felt? So so on listening to know what what? How do we test for this stuff?
Okay, so testing for this stuff is complicated with the gangs felt normally, not always, but normally you're doing send a receiver telepathy type study. You take one person and you put them with sort of into a gags felt state. You put half ping pong balls over their eyes, you put white noise into their ears, you put a red light into their face. And it allows them to turn their attention inwards and they talk about the thoughts and images that come to mind for whatever it is. Twenty minutes.
In another room, you have what's called the sender who's given a randomly selected video clip or picture to look at, and then at the end of the day you look at the correspondence between that clip and what was being said by the receiver. And I won't go into the stats of it, but you should get about twenty five percent hits. One in four of those trials should be and what's called a hit. When you run those studies, some people getting thirty two percent, thirty five percent, and
that was statistically significant. I it suggested that psychic ability existed. Our analysis didn't show that. And that's where it all started to get a word nasty. But Gansfort studies are still going on, and the debate is still going on.
Oh, the debate is still very much going on. Yeah, people will still people will keep pointing out to me, but what about jb Ryan's work? What about Jim you know? And I read you know, I read Reach of the Mind. It's actually one one of my favorite books. I have
on my bookshelf whenever I do my esp mentalism. I give a whole story about you know, this is actually how they tested for this, and and and the argument I keep getting from from the scientists who are also believers, you know, is that you know, just in meta analysis doesn't invalidate you know, the ones that like it. We did find it, like we saw it with our own eyes. You know, you can't, like, no men analysis can strike that from the record. So I find it hard, like
to do what to do with that? Like, how can we ever progress the field if we're just arguing meta analysis versus those who are like, but I found the effect at one point. Just because you know, on average there's it's a chance, doesn't mean that we didn't find it.
Yeah, So I, if I understand your question correctly, is how you are I mean a lot of paris ecologists have had personal experience of this stuff, so they've had experience which that they think proves side and after that they're out to prove it, and experiments are a way of doing that and investigating this leg stability. But I think one has to park that and argue it on the evidence. And one of the things that parapsychology shows us is evidence can be a bit squishier than we thought,
and just arguing on evidence can get problematic. So you know, Ben did his studies that we spoke about earlier on. Since then he's tried to replicate it quite rightly. He with two large scale replications that haven't worked, and so the evidence for that doesn't look so good. But that's what we have to fall back on. And the scientific method, particularly in psychology, isn't very accurate. You know, it's squishy.
There will be errors. What we believe today we're probably not going to believe in six months a year's time. You know, as there's models of the mind get better and better, we hope more and more accurate. We'll make errors along the way, and we just must get better at dealing with the uncertainties of evidence. People like certainty. They like to know that you know, X and Y is going to happen. It's not like that in psychology.
You know, it's a place where ambiguity thrives, and it's only really over time, when you've got enough evidence collected on certain conditions, you can make certain conclusions. But it will take some time.
Yeah, but I don't even know if there's anything you would find evidence wise that would convince the believers.
You know, yeah, I mean that's be true that, as we said, the same might be true the skeptics. No matter what evidence you give them, sometimes they change, you know. We like our entrenched positions, and it probably you know, whenever I was doing that stuff in public stuff, I was always seeing it like a kind of curve where you have the extreme believers one in, extreme skeptics the other.
You're probably not going to change their minds, but there's a lot of people in the middle who don't haven't made up their minds, and they're the people that you're trying to inform as accurately as you can. But it will take time. I mean this, you know, JP Ryan was what nineteen thirties, nineteen forties. We're also one hundred years on from that. We're still having the same debates, but will slowly get there. As you will rule psychology.
We will. And I appreciate your your very rigorous research. I really liked your paper Think of a Card. I like the title A retrospective analysis. The subtitles a little more boring, but a retrospective analysis of a classic ESP experiment from twenty twenty one you found. The results do not provide evidence for psychic functioning, but they do suggest and this is I want to know that data that the public's preference for particular playing cards has remained fairly stable.
So I always hear from my film Magicins females like Queen of Hearts and men love Ace of Speeds. Is that still true?
I don't always did a gender split there, But what we were showing there was that somebody did a very similar thing in the nineteen I think it was twenties. I think Side of Psychic Research did it where they asked lots of people to name a playing cards. We had that data, and then we also had the data for much more recent studies, and it turns out pretty much the same. So preferences, population, stereotypes, if you like,
for playing cards haven't changed over that time. That the problem it gives magicians is you are right that when you say name a card, people tend to say Queen a Heart, says the Spades. But the issue is that I think people also know they're commonly called cards, and so there's almost no point in predicting them or using them in a trick. I mean, you want to get things impressive. You want to say, name a card, but don't make it obvious. One way Spades or Queen of Hearts.
At least you've taken out that avenue because as you know good magic, you know there's lots of different methods, and to get a really good effect, you need to take out all of those methods. And we're mentalism oh a bit. Everyone says that is one of those those kind of methods.
So this is I mean, you really are consistently finding in lots of different Methodologi's lots of different ways. Really is not a psychic effect, but you do find some things that I still think are extraordinarily interesting, maybe just interesting. And that's that people who do believe in supernatural phenomenon tend to have certain personality characteristics or certain psychological attributes. I love that you did a whole review of this.
Can you tell you you did extensive You looked at intelligence, you know, like cognitive ability, critical thinking, belief in psychic ability. Who are what is the type of person? Can you just outline the type of person who really kind of sees the supernatural everywhere they look.
Yeah, it's not just myself. Lots of people looked at that literature and continue to look at it. The cognitive stuff certainly in terms of if you want to use the word intelligence r i Q doesn't tend to bear out. What tends to be more accurate is it's people who are high on hypnotic susceptibility, so they make good hypnosis subjects. They're high on imagination, they're intuitive thinkers. They score high on what's called openness, which is sort of a measure
of creativity. That's what tends to cluster around belief in the paranormal. And that kind of makes sense because to make the paranormal attribution, you have to be quite open to something which isn't really sort of widely believed in Western society at least. And second, you're often making a connection between two events. So if you have a dream and then the following day something happens, you have to see some kind of correspondence between that dream and what happened.
And the more creative you are, the better ability you have to see those correspondences. So you might in your dream see and make something up a ship coming in to port, and the next day a friend offers you a new job. Well, if you're not very creative, you go, there's nothing like a ship coming into port and a new job. And then if you are creative, you go, oh, yes, but a ship coming in that represents opportunity in my dream world. And look I was off this job at
Radical Change and so on. So it is it makes sense that people who have these sorts of experiences and they tend to then underpin belief, have those sorts of kind of ways of seeing the world. But it's not very related to quotes, intelligence or education levels. It goes across gender, goes across age, goes across time. I mean, belief in ESP you go back to Ryan's day, is not far off of what it is now. So in the UK we hit about fifty five percent consistently belief
in the ESP, about forty percent for ghosts. We like our ghosts over here, and those figures haven't changed much while I was looking at it for about decade.
There's a new study I don't know if you saw a really restart off the press study connected by Paul Silver and as colleagues on who seems to enjoy magic, Yes, and they found two very different kinds of people. You know, you one hand, you get the skeptical rational folk is a subclass, and then you ask on the other hand, you get what you're describing the more superstitious paranormal folk. But they both seem to equally love it, but for different reasons. Probably.
I think that's true of performing, isn't it. I mean, you know that when you do a magic trick, there are some people that if you paid the money, they wouldn't want to know what the solution is. They enjoy that magical experience, and other people would pay you for the solution and so and of course there's a magician. You have to appeal to both sets. And I think
magicians themselves tend to fall into the latter class. They tend to be about methods, how things are done, that was clever and so on, and I think they forget that most people are in the former They just want to have this wonderful, pleasant, entertaining experience. And so there's a bit of a mismatch sometimes between audience and performer. And the other problem I think from a can I solve it point of view is the whole point of magic is you can't you know, to use that phrase,
it gives you a stone in your shoe. You go around thinking well, it can't be that. It can't be that. And it's very clever because it's not only an individual can't solve it. If you're doing close up magic at a table and you walk away, you know everyone's going to be talking about that trick as a group. They can't solve it otherwise, you know, otherwise it's a bad trick. So it's very interesting from a problem solving point of view.
But for me, the challenge, and this goes right back to how twin friends and influence people, is how do you do magic and remain likable? I mean, the yeah, the contract is, you know, there's this trick I'm doing and people go right, well, what's the secret and you say, I can't tell you, and they're supposed to like you for that. I mean, we don't like people that don't tell us secrets. I cannot perform for my friends. I mean I find it simply impossible because they're just going
to go, well, how's that done? That? As a friend, I would normally tell them anything like that, and you still have to go, oh, I can't tell you. So I think that's the challenge for magicians is actually to remain likable what'st doing this weird activity of essentially lying to people.
Yeah, I think being likable is like half the battle of being a good magician, especially if you do walk around, you know, and getting people receptive to even just I think.
It's more more than half the battle. Getting people into that state of mind where they don't care in a good way. How the trick is done is absolutely key to it. You know, magicians are entertainers. Well, and it's it's difficult.
I don't know, what are your thoughts. What do you think of mentalism? I'm obsessed. I love mentalism and I and just personally it suits me and I finally gets a better reaction than the car tracks. But I just find that nothing beats the reaction of like, hey, can I guess your favorite movie?
Why do you think that?
Yeah, let's talk about that, let's nerd out about that. I there's some people I've asked people why. They're like, this is something different. They're like, this is something else that you know, like, yeah, I liked all those other card tricks you did, and I like, you know, yeah, you made a card go through a whole you know case. You know, that's nice. Okay, But like if you, I guess someone's first crush. People feel like that's something different.
It's not magic anymore. It's just pure mind reading, and it takes it to a different realm. Even though I'm I'm honest, I'm not. I don't say like, oh, I'm psychic, you know dot, I don't say I'm psychic, but it almost Sometimes when I say that, some people who are really into that stuff will be like, well, that's what a psychic would say, or that's what a magician would say,
who is actually psychic. I don't know why that is what I would say, but anyway, so there's some there's something else going on with mentalism in terms of how it hits people a personal, like a deep personal, because you're like going into their minds apparently, and that's different than the separation you have from magic.
I think that's right. I think it's a few things. One is you're right, it's normally personal to them. But also I think it's more plausible. I mean, if you're gonna put a coin your hand to make it disappear, No one actually believes that. Maybe at some point in history they did, but they don't now. Mentalism, Oh, the idea that somebody could read my mind. What do you believe in esp you believe that if it's a psychological illusion, Oh, I'm looking at your body language. Well, we know that
we give off tells in body language. We read each other's body language all the time. Maybe this person is just super good at it. So in a sense, it removes exactly what I was talking about before, which is the stone in the shoe, that that they have got an explanation, so they don't look for any other explanation, and so I think that's part of the appeal. I don't think it's the same experience as seeing physical magic. I think it's a different experience because you're seeing something
remarkable rather than something impossible. You have got working hypotheses in your head. That may not be what the performer is doing, of course, but still it feels like to me, it's closer if you went to the circus. I'm going to the circus in two days. If I go to the circus and there's flying trapeze people and they do a triple, I go, oh, my goodness. I know you've dedicated your life to that, and I believe that is a genuine display of physical skill. And I go, oh,
my goodness, incredible. If I found out actually just on a rig and they're being held up by wires, it's not really a triple, I would be devastated. Yes, that's not the experience I'm paying for. And I think mentally kind of occupies that space. It's like I'm seeing something remarkable. Maybe it's this, maybe it's that. But it's very different to magic, which we know is a trick. I think that's why, in part, why people like it. So it's
it's a very powerful tool. It's been around for a long time in one form or another, and it always piggybacks on public belief. You know when when public did believe in spirits and seances, well the mentalists were doing that, and it's the esp they were doing that. Now it's all about body language. Well they're doing that. So it has an interesting kind of evolution.
I think. Yeah, but it's very cultural irrelevant right now with the telepathy deeps, the the topic deeps in popularity, I feel like I feel like mentalism is like cool again, you know, it's like it's bad, we're back.
Maybe, And also depend on performance. I mean, over here we have Darren Brown that that style of magic was not particularly popular until Darren came along. He's an astonishing performer, and suddenly you see everybody doing all that kind of stuff. You know. Oh yeah, well yeah, yeah.
Of course, Yeah, that's amazing.
I mean, I mean he's first special if you look back to the very first one really filmed at the university, yea, yeah, he does a a stunt demonstration be twins. I'm there, and then I helped out with a couple of the TV programs and stuff, and he's astonishing. I actually thought invented a mind reading item, and I'm not I don't do mentalism, but I showed it to him and it was involved in book. He took it off me, performed it himself in two seconds and fooled me with my
own creation. I mean, he's he's really really good. So yeah, it's great.
He's so intelligent, you know as well. Yeah, that's so cool. When I used to teach cognitive psychology and n y U, I would show video of his stuff, and that was way back when I didn't even know anything about how he actually did stuff. So he actually foroled me. He actually fooled me in a sense, like I used an example of like how we can really influence people's minds by articulously, you know, like putting things in the environment.
You know, you know what I'm saying. But so anyway, but once you've got.
That explanation, so I've you and I have been to a lot of magic conventions. Yeah, there's very big one coming up next week in this country at Blackpool. I will see the air back, but I will see stuff there. I'm not going this year, but when I normally go, I will see stuff that blows me away. I've got no idea, But in magic forties, I've got no idea how it's done. When I go and see psychics work, and I've sat in on some genuine seances, it's awful.
The trickery is awful. And the reason is it doesn't need to be any better because no one's looking for a trick to commune with the spirits, true, and so you don't They don't need to be good magicians or good tricksters. It's the magicians that need to be because everyone knows they're watching a magic trick. So it's it's kind of interesting that the power of that frame of saying, actually this is genuine or this is body language or whatever is. It prevents people going any deeper where magicians
don't have that frame. They're saying it's a trick and everyone's going good. This is a challenge. I'll try and work the outlet.
What a terrific point. You know. People are I mean seanswers what are they called? Psychic psychic sancewers.
Yeah, we've done. I've done loads of fake saliances, probably a hundred sort of dark room seances. I love doing them. Well.
The ones that professionally, you know do they have it easier because their audience is coming to them with just you know, no question, this is true, right, you know, that's far better than having to perform in a drunk you know bar with the skeptical you know girl who's like okay, well I'm going to change my mind now and trying to fool you totally.
And you go along to a spiritualist church or a psychic reading, you know whatever. People are there to be receptive when you say, you know what they're making, they're doing all the work for you. Go along for a palm reading or crystal ball really whatever it is. They are there to do that work for you. Magicians will never get away with that stuff because they're tending it
in it and it can be the same people. The same people at one minute will be believing of a palm reading will be very skeptical of magicians trying to solve the trick the next because they've switched. They've switched frames.
That is so funny and interesting about humans, just that fact. Yeah, so you don't think we can commune with the dead.
I haven't seen convincing evidence of that. I've seen convincing evidence of a lack of communicating with the dead. We've done a lot of fake seances that goes back as a magician actor in this country called Andy Nan, who works with Darren a lot actually, and some of Andy's first shows with me doing these fake seances when we were both very very young performers, and it was incredible. We have these sort of loominous objects moving around in the dark and so on, so much fun music, traditional
Victorian methods. They're very simple, but still for people because when you're in the darkness, you're very vulnerable. You can't tell how far away objects are or where people are and so on. So yeah, I had a lot of fun doing that that stuff.
My my friend Spencer Greenberg did a ward scale study about astrologists and and wanted to know do they really believe this is true? And he found that an awful lot, maybe even the majority. I mean, they really believe in what they're not like, it's not like they're they're trying to pour fast one over others. But and so I said, now do psychics is what I said. He's like, Hey, that'll be my next study. But I want to know if you have any insight into that, because I do,
Like I have some friends who are mediums. They're professional mediums, and I don't, you know, I don't feel like it's my place, Like I get the sense of my talk to them. They actually believe they are mediums. They are communicating with the dead. So I don't think all mediums are, you know, doing the trickery and conscious of their trickery. Is there something else going on where like I don't know what it is, Like in my head, it just seems so obvious that if I'm doing trickery, I know
I'm doing trickery. I can't imagine. I can't imagine myself doing trickery not knowing it. But there seems to be a case where a lot of psychics believe their psychics, and why do they believe their psychics?
Yeah, well, they're not doing tricks per se. Most of those are being doing readings. I think when you get to like to say, physical phenomena, the sunes room phenomena, then they are tricking people, and they would know about that. Most of them are doing readings. So what happens there? Somebody sits down, you come up with a reading, and the person goes, my goodness, that's incredibly accurate, and you could easily see how that gets internalized of oh, I've
got some kind of gifts. Then, because the feedback you're getting so my auntswer used to be up until a few months ago, I think the vast majority of them believe their own kind of abilities. However, I then met a friend of mine who works as a professional psychic, and he said, you're kidding me. He said, I go out every day as all my colleagues do. We say the same thing to people. All the readings are the same, he said, I might a minor variation in but people
are endorsing the same reading night after night. There's no way we're doing that and not realizing that most of it is blowney. So he flipped me the other way. He said, what keeps you going are the amazing hits? He said, sometimes you go into a weird space and you get hit, and that's what convinces you. But most of the time, he said, you know what, We're all just saying the same thing and getting the same feedback.
So I don't know.
I then flip back a little bit.
Why this is fastening insights? So thank you? Why are they ethically okay with that?
Well, I mean mentalists, you asked the same question to them. You know that after they don't say to people this is a trick. They'll say I'm doing X, Y and Z and try and keep them away from the trick work.
But psychics are an entertainers.
Well, that's the greater good argument. So the argument is for some greater Well, you could say within an entertainment context, it's all fine, and psychics would probably say the same. A lot of it is within entertainment, or I suspect most of them will do a greater good argument, which is that it's hard in this country to get access to a therapist. Most people can't afford that it's not on the national health system. Over here, they give somebody
attention for twenty minutes and it helps that person. And the evidence is that I think they're right that most people enjoy going to psychics and find it helpful. When you do those kind of studies, that's probably ethically where they go, is my guess.
I see. So you really don't think there's any evidence at all for the idea that psychic ability is an individual differences variable, that there really are some people on this planet that have this gift.
I wouldn't say it, no, wady Oviously, it's loads of evidence. You look at upstairs. I've got all the parapsychology journals. They're full of evidence. The question is is it convincing. I don't find it particularly convincing, but who knows. Maybe that will change in the future. There's certainly an argument
there for carrying out those studies. If you're getting into psychically gifted people, you know, those that can sit down and instantly do this stuff, and it's a very large effect size, Well that's very easy to test, and I find those tests of the gifted psychics completely unconvincing. So most of the lab evidence is it's like a psychologic experiment. You test two hundred people. You put all their results together, it's slightly better than chance. That's very different to you know,
the psychic that goes. I can turn this thing on, tell you all about future dead, easy to test, and normally completely unconvincing the results of those tests.
It's all sad, like I want there to be I want this to exist. Good thing would be interesting. Well what do you do you.
Though, I mean it would it would change some people got different worldviews. I mean, if you believe in life after death. I guess that's kind of comforting. This is what lies about the future, is that it's uncertain. If I knew what the future held for you and it was, you know, awful, and I told you that and you knew I was correct, I'm not certain that's an uplifting that's true.
I think that there is an individual differences variable that's relevant here, even though it's not psychic ability. And that was the major topic of my pH D, wasn't plsit learning. I think there are some people who really do, like I was curious, Like IQ tests have been studied, but they're in an implicit intelligence that are some people generally better at unconscious pattern recognition and or non conscious patterned recognition. How does that correlate with IQ? So that was my
cognition paper, was showing a zero correlation between the two. Yeah, and I was like the first to really adopt those implicit learning tasks and the cognitive science literature for individual differences. So that was my dissertation.
So you tell me what's an implicit learning task.
One one would be like the zero reaction time task where you have people just press a key corresponding to a letter as fast as they can, and we look at reaction times and we see that some people over time without any understanding or recognition of it because you need you debrief them at the end. You're like, do you think you learned anything from this boring ass task? And they're like no, And some of them actually were much quicker at learning the reoccurring like very complex pattern
And that's one example. Another thing would be like Arthur Weber's artificial grammar eLearning task, where some people, after being exposed to lots of different a fake grammar, actually learned the principles better statistical warning. You know, it's how other people would in the order to describe.
It years ago. I don't if this council night. It's not my field. I did a ESP thing with an entire class where I had deck of cards I stacked red red black, red, red black, red, red black, and as people try to guess it, and they didn't pick up on the pattern consciously, but they slowly got better as a group. Yes, and then slowly thought that And
you can see in which differences in there. We never looked at it, but they slowly thought there was ESP emerging because on different groups of trials they were slowly getting better. So I didn't that would count as the same thing.
It would, it would, it really would. That could have been another task that, you know, we added to our battery. So at the general level, yeah, people show their significant effects of pussering and and there are individual differences. Both are true at the same time. So I am just thinking that I really do think there are some people who are more intuitive whatever, you know, Like I think it's scientifically, scientifically that means something that's not like a
woo woo statement. And and I don't think it's just the high intelligence people. This is something I wanted to point out, you know. It's like, so I have I think called the dual process theory of intelligence. But so I think that with psychics with you know, a lot of these mediums that I meet. I have a friend who's a medium, for instance, and I find her the most like she's like emotionally open in an incredible way.
She is just so open. And we found a correlation between and PUSS learning and openness to experience the personality.
Trait, which is the one I was talking about before with stuff. Yeah.
Yes, but but but you meet someone with three forced inner deviations that mean an openness to experience, and it is a different kind of person yes, And and I'm not saying this is magical, but I'm saying there is something there that I think, you know, we could do well to appreciate more as an individual differences variable. And it's a talent, it's a skill even though it doesn't we don't necessarily have to go to their psychic level. But they're picking up on lots of nuances.
Yeah, I think that's right. But my understanding is you'd only have those intuitive thoughts and trust them when you've got a lot of experience with whatever it is that you're you're doing. Ye, And so you know, I've given talks on psychology. I give a lot of public talks, and in fact, there's one particular talk on luck I've given hundreds of times. During that talk, often I'll get an intuitive feeling about that audience that I need to do this or there's going to be a problem coming up,
and it's normally always right. Well, that's because I've given the talk so many times, you know. I often say when I teach public speaking, silence is odd in a group because board silence sounds different to interested silence, and if you've given a lot of talks, you can hear the difference. There's a very subtle difference in board silence and interesting. So intuitively I'll go, I have to make this more interesting now because I can hear the group of board or actually I can take them down that
root because I can hear that they're interesting. I'm not thinking about that. I'm just intuitively doing it. So yeah, absolutely, I think intuition is really important. I think, perhaps, well, at this half my ideas for studies and books and so on come to me in dreams. I often wake up and write down dreams because that's that's where they manifest themselves, solutions to problems and solved, so we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.
I think, yeah, I agree. Are you Are you familiar with Diane Pale's research?
No, I'm not. No.
Diane Hennessy Pale she studies the science of esp and she's one of the ones who was featured on the Telepathy Teeps podcast. I just had her on my podcast, so I can I can send you my chat with her as well. She seems to be pretty we I mean, I guess we both describe ourselves as open skeptics, you know, which I think is probably the right way to be. And well, obviously I think it's the right way to be if that's where I am. But yeah, but doctor Powell,
she really believes, you know, there's something here. But when we talked about this, picking up the nuance and stuff, it's interesting because a lot of these auto there's something special here with autistic savants that I think is worth
further investigation because they're completely nonverbal. I think there in plicit learning ability is I did some research at Cambridge, University of Cambridge on this topic and I'm gonna I'm gonna collaborate with UH with uh Simon Baron Cohen to test some of these kids, you know from the telep Day tapes, because I think there's something, there's something, there's
something here. It's really interesting where if you're completely nonverbal, if you're completely uh yeah, completely nonverbal, and you really hone this incredible ability to just be observant to regularities and patterns you're not like in by language so much, it can really you can become, like you know, talking about ericson ten years of deliberate practice, you could become such an expert in something that it can really blow
people's minds, you know. And you found in the telepty tapes that it's usually the mother or the person that the child. As soon as you bring in like a stranger, they can't read their mind anymore. And yeah, I kept bringing that up. I was like, I was like, I want to double cook on that, because there's something about that, Like if I spend enough time with anyone, you start to find like like couples start to complete each other's sentences.
They don't call themselves psychics, right, They start to know each other so well. So I think there's something going on there where like these kids get to know their moms so well.
It's interesting I mean, I don't know that work. The stuff I do know, which is about psychology of lying, is actually the opposite, which is that when people know each other well, they are less able to detect lies in their partner's long term friends. But the reason for that is they exhibit what's called a truth bias, which is they don't want to believe their partners and friends are lying, so they always say truth on it. So is slightly different, but yeah, I guess that could be true.
It's an interesting, exciting idea, and yeah, look into it, go for it. I mean, that gets full circle. That feels like a meaningful thing to do one way or another.
Yeah, for sure. Just to conclude this interview with success in life, a big.
We haven't touched on at all after saying we would do at the.
Beginning, Yeah, I'm happy to do it now for a little bit, a couple of minutes, because I am really fascinated with a thread that runs through multiple of your books, and that's from positive thinking to positive action. I think that summarizes a lot of the thread that runs, like just act already, you know, and can you kind of explain to me the differencely parsive thinking positive acting And are you kind of yeah, why do you think action is so important for success in life?
I just think as humans we learn by doing stuff. There's only so many simulations you can run in your head. So for me, if I'm inventing a magic trick, I can think of something I think that will work and much small change here, or if I'm doing one of
the quackology videos. But you know what, nothing beats getting out a deck of cars or whatever it is and doing it for a real person and you suddenly find out that thing that you thought would fly they detect in two seconds, and something else that you thought would be awful actually turns out to be brilliant. We learn by doing. And if you look at this on the most successful people, they do they don't just talk about it.
Many many, many, many many years ago, I sat up in a tree house with a good friend of mine, Adrian Owen, now a very famous European scientist. I know, I know Adrian, and I go back to ucl We were undergraduates together and we shared a flat together. We did the stuff in Covent Garden was jointed with.
Adrian don wonderful, wonderful.
So we sat there and We sat up in this treehouse on our first holiday together in the south of England and we're talking about various plans and we made a pact, which is that if we mentioned an idea three times, we had to do it, and that we both of us have stayed with that throughout our lives. It's been thirty something years now that if you say something three times, you have to do it instead of
just talking about it. And it's a very good formula for success because you find out this thing's a terrible idea or a good idea or whatever, but you get out there and when you get out there, you attract other people because they find out what you're doing other like minded people or help you or whatever. So I'm a huge fan of doing where a lot of psychology self help is about thinking and thinking differently where I think,
you know what, just get on and do it. The worst that happened is you'll fail and you'll learn something, you know. I did a show of the Edber Fringe here last year in August, and normally do magic shows. Well, the first one wasn't my best show, to put it mildly, but you have to do ten in a row and by the time you hit show ten, it was pretty tight and I could sat at home imagining this wonderful show and how funny and hilarious it was going to be.
Doesn't matter until you're out there doing it. That's what you learn.
Such a deep truth and you know that that is the thread that runs through so much of your discussions about happiness. And and I'm a super interested integrating your work with Darren Brown's work on happiness. You know, the psychology of happiness, Yes.
Yeah, yeah, and it's great and I think, I mean, happiness is slightly different to success, but the two of them are heavily related. Slightly different, but I just think we're very good at, you know, whatever it is. So I always say to my students, you know, there'll be some passion you've got in life, and you can you can pursue psychology if you want, but you'll be far more successful if you pursue that passion. And pursue means get out there and do it, don't just think about
it or talk about it or whatever. And that was great about psychology is you often combine those two. If you love horse riding, where you can do the psychology of horse riding if you love running, you do the psychology of running, and you'll be the only person in the world that has those Probably that those two things combined, therefore you become an expert and you spend longer doing it than anyone else. I spent all my life looking psychology and magic. It doesn't feel like work. I love
doing it. That idea of doing that psychology of magic stuff actually comes from Max Maven. I went to the Magic Castle when I was about eighteen nineteen and I said to Max, I'm thinking of being a professional magician. He said, what's your other option? I said, a psychologist, and he said, combine them. You'll become one of the very few people looking in at psychology of magic. Boy, that was great advice.
You're giving me chills. You're giving me a chill. You're a very inspirational figure to me. You really are. I feel the same way. I feel like there's so many mentalists out specifically mentalism. There's so many mentalists out there who say they do psychology, but the lane of psychologist, like legit psychologists who do mentalism, I feel like, is
much smaller, and so for me that's exciting. You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of potential there to use mentalism to like unlock people's potential or like show people that like you know, there there's you know, the reach of their minds. Jb Ryan would say.
Well, probably every psychology paper is potentially a good presentation for a piece of mentalism, but you have to know that stuff. But it goes beyond you know, magic. I think you know, every single undergraduate will have some passion and often it's not psychology, it's something outside of that, and their eyes light up and they starts talking in
a really energetic way when they're talking about that. And tapping that energy and bringing it into psychology, you know, is one way and making it meaningful and probably means a far more successful career.
Yeah.
Working on a new for In show which will be out in August for magicians listening. I'll be over at FISM in July in Italy, which is a sort of week long celebration of magic, and also doing some other work which will be published very very soon. I've just seen that the paper before it goes into the journal, looking at OPT collusions, particularly ambiguous OPT collusions to kind of duck rabbit things. There's a new take on those. So yes, still doing all this stuff after all these years.
But thank you for your kind comments throughout this.
It's very kind, of course I mean them. And I love your videos on YouTube, so everyone check out Richard's Escape from Prison. Check out Richard's Perception. You like playing a manipulating perception by putting things closer and farther away.
Yeah, it's all on the quacology channel and we did that when. Yeah, and the sort of infancy a YouTube actually and now I meet people in their sort of mid twenties and going I watched it as a kid makes me feel terribly old, but delighted that since ring anyone.
Well, anyway, thank you so much, Richard, thank you for your time today, Thanks for going to be on the podcast. And now I guess I'll catch you on the Secret Magic Facebook groups.
Yeah, please please do it lovely to chat to you. Thank you