Selects: How ESP Works (?)

Summary

Stuff You Should Know: Selects – How ESP Works (Oct 18, 2025)

Hosts: Josh Clark & Charles W. "Chuck" Bryant
Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
Episode: Selects: How ESP Works
Release Date: October 18, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this classic “Selects” episode, Josh and Chuck dive into the weird and fascinating world of ESP—Extra-Sensory Perception. They discuss its many categories, the scientific attempts to study it, why people keep believing, and the ongoing skeptic vs. believer debate. Blending humor with a healthy skepticism, they explore the roots, experiments, and cultural fascination with ESP, from Zener cards to Princeton’s random number generators, psychic frauds, and government experiments.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening: New Studio Vibes & Introduction to ESP

• [02:21] The hosts excitedly announce they’re in their brand new studio, bantering about its coziness and exclusivity.
• They swiftly pivot to the day’s topic: Extra-Sensory Perception.
• Memorable moment: Joking about detecting “butt detection” and alarms for unauthorized studio use.

2. Personal Perspectives on ESP

• [04:20] Josh asks, “Do you believe in ESP?”
  • Chuck: “No. Not at all.”
  • Both agree humans are good at making guesses, but Chuck credits coincidence and selective memory.
• Josh shares his youthful interest:

  “I spent so many years of my life believing in stuff like that…I wanted to go to Duke University to study at their parapsychology department.” [05:20]

3. Defining the Landscape: ESP & Psi

• [06:26] They outline how ESP is an umbrella term for all types of paranormal perception, a concept expanded to “psi” to reflect ideas beyond supernatural, rooted in the Greek letter for “psyche.”
• JB Rhine and his Duke lab are credited as foundational figures.

4. Categories of ESP

• [07:13–10:29] Chuck lists ESP types:
  • Telepathy: Mind-to-mind thought reading.
  • Clairvoyance: Perceiving distant events/objects.
  • Precognition & Retrocognition: Seeing the future or the distant past (with discussion of retrocausality from quantum physics).
  • Mediumship: Channeling spirits (e.g., Ms. Cleo).
  • Psychometry: Reading information by touch (“the Dead Zone” reference).
  • Telekinesis: Moving/manipulating objects with the mind (Uri Geller/spoon bending).
  • “But there is no spoon.” (The Matrix reference)

5. ESP Research: The Early Days

• [11:02–13:40]
  • Society for Psychical Research & William James: rooting out fraud, but occasionally stumped by unusual cases.
  • Madame Blavatsky: exposed as a mediumistic fraud, but was pivotal in theosophy and the proliferation of séance culture.
  • Memorable tangent: Comparison of cult documentaries (“The Source Family”) and quirky cult behaviors.

6. Theories on Who Has ESP

• [14:39]
  • Some believe everyone has ESP potential; others, only gifted individuals; some think it’s very rare or situational.
  • “The shinning.” (Simpsons reference)
  • Josh admits he fits into none of the classic categories.

7. Attempting to Explain ESP Scientifically

• [18:19–22:59]
  • Early theory: ESP as part of the electromagnetic spectrum (abandoned due to lack of brain evidence and inability to explain effects across space/time).
  • Key experiment: MRI studies showed no special brain region activates during ESP attempts.
  • Modern proposals: “Spillover” from alternate dimensions—a concept skeptics deride as unfalsifiable.
  • Quote: “With the electromagnetic spectrum explanation…it makes even less sense.” [22:29]

8. Why Do People Still Believe? Coincidence and Anecdotes

• [23:06–26:14]
  • Powerful anecdotal evidence: e.g., the 1898 novel “Futility” about the ship “Titan,” eerily similar to Titanic’s fate.
  • Josh: “It is interesting, and it’s an amazing coincidence…” [25:22]
  • However, once author’s expertise and cultural context are revealed, the supernatural explanation crumbles—emphasizing the role of selective memory.

9. JB Rhine’s Experiments & Zener Cards

• [26:16–33:42]
  • Zener cards: “If you’ve seen Ghostbusters…” [26:46]
  • Chuck tries an online Zener card test: “I only got six out of 25. At the end it just said ‘you are not a psychic.'” [27:27]
  • Problems of “sensory leakage”—people subconsciously pick up cues from the card holder’s micro-expressions.
  • Introduction of the Ganzfeld experiment: subjects isolated with red lighting and white noise (ping pong ball goggles!), to cut off sensory cues.

10. Machine Experiments: Can Thought Alter Randomness?

• [28:43–30:32]
  • Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR): studies on whether human thought can affect random number generators.
  • After millions of trials, a slight but statistically significant effect is claimed.
  • “The weird thing is…there is a slight, very slight, but measurable effect that human thought has on a random number generator.” [29:57]

11. Skeptical Reviews & The Issue of Fraud

• [31:12–35:49]
  • Early Zener card experiments criticized for flaws (translucent cards, inadvertent cues).
  • Sensory leakage addressed, but more rigorous protocols always see effect sizes drop.
  • Rhine, though a believer, is separate from outright fraud; he did correct mistakes when pointed out (“He was daring enough to stake his entire career on a field of study that will get anybody mocked...”). [34:12]
  • Notable moment: The “Levy Affair” involving tampering with equipment and data correction.

12. Skeptical Arguments: Statistics, Coincidence & the Limits of Memory

• [38:49–42:13]
  • Skeptics assert “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
  • Chuck’s landline “phone will ring” experience—likely explained by unnoticed mechanical noises, not ESP.
  • Josh: “Had I been a goat at a petting zoo and I went over and talked to the cow and the cow was writing the email about recycling bins…maybe.” [40:43]

13. Hyperobservant People, Subconscious Cues, and the Science

• [44:01–46:18]
  • People thought to have ESP may simply be highly observant, especially of micro-expressions and environmental details.
  • Parapsychologists acknowledge most ESP-like experiences can be explained this way, but leave room for further research, especially for unexplained outliers.

14. Modern Laboratory Studies: Darrell Bem’s Experiments

• [46:56–53:57]
  • Darrell Bem’s peer-reviewed experiments at Cornell:
    • Erotic images and precognition: Students selected which of two “curtains” would reveal erotic pictures, and results were >50% (53.1%)—above chance.
    • Word recall experiment: Participants remembered words more often if they practiced them after the memory test (suggesting retrocausality).
  • Note: Bem’s findings were heavily criticized and not independently reproducible, but the effect sizes are comparable to those in accepted health research.
  • Quote: “That is about the same as…the link between calcium intake and bone mass, the link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.” [50:15]

15. Fraudulent Psychics vs. Scientific Parapsychologists

• [53:57–56:09]
  • Distinguishing between showmen (e.g., John Edward) who use “cold reading” versus researchers.
  • James Randi’s famous $1 million challenge (“no one stepped up to do that”), criticized for mockery rather than scientific skepticism.
  • Josh: “To me, the presence of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity…It’s belief against belief.” [55:33]

16. Government Interest: ESP & Remote Viewing

• [56:39–57:26]
  • The CIA’s now-declassified remote viewing experiments—subject of the book “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”
  • Nightline segment with Robert Gates and “softball questions” about government-funded ESP research.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Josh: “It’s not so much that I believe in ESP, it’s more that I refuse to just utterly disbelieve in the possibility of it.” [05:41]
• Chuck: “I think it’s just the nature of coincidence is going to happen, because so many things happen every day…” [04:48]
• Josh: “But the reason why people still believe in this stuff is because of either hearing a story about their friend who said, ‘Listen to this crazy thing happen’ or experiencing it themselves in some way…” [23:06]
• Josh: “When a machine is involved that there is no telepathy…there would only be clairvoyance.” [28:31]
• Chuck: “Did you see the Source Family, by the way, that documentary?…it was pretty great. Oh, yeah, yeah, they’re all fine. They’re all just a bunch of hippies still.” [13:05]
• Josh on James Randi: “To me, the presence of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity…” [55:33]
• Josh: “If you can get some funding for it, who cares? That’s my motto.” [56:28]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:21 — Show intro, new studio banter, ESP introduction
• 04:20 — Hosts discuss personal beliefs about ESP
• 07:13 — Categories of ESP explained
• 11:02 — Early research and fraud detection in psychical research
• 14:39 — Who might have ESP, possible categories of “giftedness”
• 18:19 — ESP as electromagnetic signal: modern neuroscience perspective
• 23:06 — Anecdotal “predictions” and the nature of coincidence
• 26:16 — JB Rhine’s Zener card experiments and issues of “sensory leakage”
• 28:43 — PEAR lab and mind influencing random number generators
• 31:12 — Zener card flaws and correcting for bias
• 38:49 — Skeptics’ arguments: statistics, coincidence, and memory bias
• 42:13 — Subconscious cues and hyperobservant people (“super intuitive” explanation)
• 46:56 — Darrell Bem’s controversial experiments and issues with reproducibility
• 53:57 — Distinct difference between fraudulent psychics and actual research
• 56:39 — CIA/remote viewing programs and Nightline segment

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Conclusion / Tone

With characteristic humor and skepticism, Josh and Chuck skillfully balance open-mindedness with scientific scrutiny, emphasizing that while much of ESP can be explained by observation, memory, and probability, science remains open to new evidence—if it’s robust.

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If you want more about ESP, start with “esp” at howstuffworks.com.
And remember: “If you can get some funding for it, who cares?” – Chuck Bryant [56:28]

Transcript

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[Josh Clark]

Hey guys, it's Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2015 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 so I hope you will open your mind. Tune in, turn on, drop out, keep on trucking and enjoy this episode.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Why?

[Josh Clark]

I just knew.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, and dudes and dudettes. We are in our new Studio.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Can you tell? Does it sound different?

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Oh, gotcha. Yeah. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, all ours. Everybody else at House Stuff works. Doesn't really know that yet, but they will.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. What's that called? Dmr.

[Josh Clark]

Tmi.

[Chuck Bryant]

How are you, sir?

[Josh Clark]

I'm pretty good.

[Chuck Bryant]

I feel like this is fancy. This is our first real studio. That's not true.

[Josh Clark]

No. I'm trying to remember. The last one was.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, but it's not a utility closet. It's not a lactation room.

[Josh Clark]

It's not. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's not a murder room.

[Josh Clark]

It's not like, an office with, like, desk for, like, office furniture.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It's a. It's a studio that was built out for the specific purpose of recording podcasts.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yep. All we have to do is put up our Aaron Cooper originals, the artwork.

[Josh Clark]

Got a couple of those waiting to go.

[Chuck Bryant]

And we got to work on the lighting in here a little bit. Yeah, Jerry said she's gonna hang some china balls for us.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, she keeps pushing the china balls.

[Chuck Bryant]

So, anyway, enough about that. We just wanted to say we're super excited to be in our new office and our new studio.

[Josh Clark]

It does feel good. Yeah, kudos for that intro. I'm not gonna say that. I knew you were gonna say that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I was gonna say that, too.

[Josh Clark]

I knew that you were thinking of saying that. Chuck?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes. Esp.

[Josh Clark]

Do you believe in esp? No. No, not at all. What do you think it is? Because surely, I mean, just about anyone could agree that humans have some sort of ability somehow to make good guesses or to predict the future, whatever you want to call it. Do you agree, or do you think it's strictly just us selectively paying attention to random instances over others.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think it's that. And as we'll talk about, I think it's 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. But the other millions of dreams you have that don't, I think those are the ones that are the Tell. I gotcha, you know. Do you?

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. Like, I want to. I spent so many years of my life believing in stuff like that 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, voraciously.

[Chuck Bryant]

So Ghostbusters really did a number on you.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When that came along, I was like, sure, this was made for me. But as an adult, it's not so much that I believe in esp, it's more that I refuse to just utterly disbelieve in the possibility of it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. Okay.

[Josh Clark]

You know what I mean?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I got you there. Because we don't know everything about everything yet.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But, yeah, I'm in the other camp, and I'm not even going to say the skeptic camp, because those people just bug me.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know.

[Josh Clark]

We'll find out.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 paranormal phenomena, which you could also call psy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And so a dude named JB Rhine, who we'll talk about later, he coined ESP the granddaddy. And then in the 40s, another guy coined the term psi. And psi is the Greek letter, and it's equated with psyche or the soul.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, psi.

[Josh Clark]

And the reason that the guy chose psi is because he felt ESP suggested it was something supernatural.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, sure.

[Josh Clark]

And psy, he felt. Suggested that this is a normal part of humanity. We just don't understand it.

[Chuck Bryant]

It sounds like science.

[Josh Clark]

You're right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But there are several categories of esp, and this is the one. I never knew the actual definitions for these. I sort of just threw them all in a bag together. You have telepathy, and that's when you can, you know. You're over there reading my thoughts.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, Chuck is really not happy to be in the new studio.

[Josh Clark]

That's not true.

[Chuck Bryant]

He'd rather be at home on the couch.

[Josh Clark]

I'm reading your thoughts right now, and I know that you like this place.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, well, you're a telepath, right? Clairvoyance, which is the ability to see events or things, objects happening somewhere else at the same time. So are you clairvoyant I am.

[Josh Clark]

I'm seeing your couch right now, and I'm seeing It's not that comfy. So you're not missing that much at the moment.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know somewhere Jonathan Strickland is waxing his head. His bald head.

[Josh Clark]

That's just a logical assumption.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, then we have our precogs. Precognition. That's when you see into the future. Retrocogs. Retrocognition. You can see into the distant past.

[Josh Clark]

There's another. That's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition, like seeing a cave like Tuk Tuk running around with the dinosaurs like you do, which I guess never would have happened. But there's another term for retrocognition. Whereas something in the future affects something in the past. So a decision you make in the future affects your past. And an example given is that you have a dream about a dinosaur. Now, let's say a spotted dog. Okay. And then the first thing the next morning, you go outside to water your lawn, and the same spotted dog or a similar spotted dog walks by. The idea isn't that that was very coincidental or that you had ESP in your dreams, but that you seeing that dog in the morning affected your dream the night before.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay.

[Josh Clark]

So that's another definition that's emerging for retrocognition that's getting a lot of traction because of the stuff we're finding on the quantum scale, just weirdness like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I forgot about her.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then you have.

[Josh Clark]

I wonder how much money that woman grossed in the 90s.

[Chuck Bryant]

She made a lot of dough.

[Josh Clark]

I hope so.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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, her first million, you know, like, she worked.

[Chuck Bryant]

So you're not in the camp of, like, she's taking people's money and taking advantage of people.

[Josh Clark]

I see that argument.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then you have psychometry, which is the ability to read info about a person, place by touching the person or object. And that's what I like to call the dead zone.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Christopher Walken, he would place his hands on you and he would see something.

[Josh Clark]

Man. I think we talked about it recently about how that movie holds up still.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That is such a Good movie.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it really is good. Chris Walken.

[Josh Clark]

There's another one, Chuck, called Telekinesis, which is like Uri Geller stroking a spoon and it bending.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Like being able to manipulate matter just using a light touch or your mind.

[Chuck Bryant]

But there is no spoon.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, wasn't that from Matrix?

[Chuck Bryant]

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 1930s, where he started at Duke University studying parapsychology, basically.

[Josh Clark]

And he wasn't the first. He was one of the first laboratory experimenters in academia to really study Psy. Right before him, probably about 40 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 phenomenon.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And they did two things. They outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like, very famously, Madame Blavatsky. But then they also investigated ones like. They approached the. Typically with, like, an open mind. And if they found somebody that they just couldn't explain, they would. They studied them. So they were. They were studying each one with an open mind. And the ones they figured out were frauds they outed as frauds. The ones they figured out couldn't quite explain. Yeah, they sought to investigate scientifically rather than just saying, oh, they're a fraud somehow.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

So that was the groundwork of the study of psy.

[Chuck Bryant]

What was Madame Blavatsky's deal of the Coney Island Blavatsky?

[Josh Clark]

She was almost a cult leader. You could argue she was. She created. Oh, man. It's called, like, theodism, I think, which is. It was almost a cult. It was a huge movement in the 19th 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 stuff like that. And she gained a lot of power and wealth and prestige until she was outed as a fraud. And I don't remember the. It's theosophy. That's what it is. Not theoism. Theoism has to do with Theo Huxtable.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did you see the Source Family, by the way, that documentary?

[Josh Clark]

No, I haven't.

[Chuck Bryant]

About the LA cult in the 70s.

[Josh Clark]

I saw the. The Icon on Netflix and ever clicked. Is it good?

[Chuck Bryant]

It's really good. And it's. It's. It's awesome, actually. I recommend everyone see it. It's one of those where like they interview a lot of them today and they weren't like, you know, they didn't commit suicide. Like everyone was like, it was pretty great. Oh, yeah, yeah, they're all fine. They're all just a bunch of hippies still.

[Josh Clark]

They were out in la.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah, right. In Hollywood.

[Josh Clark]

There was one in. There was a documentary I saw about a cult in Miami and they were like super fundamentalist Christian.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But they also were the basis of their religion was. Was formed on pot too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, that's what the Source family was.

[Josh Clark]

I wonder if they were related.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, it was the 70s.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

There were a lot of pot cults. I bet.

[Josh Clark]

But did they turn into like huge pot dealers?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I don't think so.

[Josh Clark]

This cult did.

[Chuck Bryant]

They had a band though, and the called the Source. You know, I can't remember the name of the band, but it's pretty interesting to listen.

[Josh Clark]

Manhattan Transfer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that was it. It's a really good documentary though. It's just funny to see all these people now. They're like. It was awesome.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Had a lot of sex and smoked a lot of weed.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's kind of what I did. These guys didn't seem to have a lot of sex though. They were like real like compartmentalized gender wise and like male dominance and all that. But they just smoked a ton of pot all the time, including their little kids.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, that's not good.

[Josh Clark]

Like 4 year olds smoking pot.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's terrible.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

You had me up. You lost me there.

[Josh Clark]

I lost everybody there in that documentary.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. All right, so back to this ESP thing.

[Josh Clark]

J.B. ryan.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, J.B. ryan. Well, basically 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, and that they have to be in this special, like, you know, mental state to access it.

[Josh Clark]

The shinning.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, the shinning. And then other folks say that everyone has that potential, but some people are just like in tune with it. And some people aren't.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And you fall into none of those three camp.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

So we'll talk a little more about some ideas of what ESP is right after this.

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[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And like you said, it fell out of favor because basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves through time or you didn't pick up on some special part of your brain that, like, receives this message.

[Josh Clark]

And there was a. Did you see that study I sent you that was, I think, from 2010, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

And now I'm showing you a picture of the flower. And that's it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. It's lovely. Except it sounds like a German rave.

[Josh Clark]

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 and have her 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Gotcha.

[Josh Clark]

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 up.

[Odoo Advertiser]

Picking.

[Josh Clark]

Picking that up.

[Chuck Bryant]

Plus, if Emily's over there, my first guess is going to be dog every time. And it's flower. And then it's not going to.

[Josh Clark]

Well, it wasn't about guessing. It was just to see, like, showing you the ESP version.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And then the non ESP version of the same thing. So you weren't guessing. Do you understand?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I get it now. I would have guessed dog or wine.

[Josh Clark]

There wasn't guessing.

[Chuck Bryant]

I still would have guessed. Emily thinks she has the gift a little bit, so she would have been disappointed.

[Josh Clark]

She's got the shin.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, a little. She thinks.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But I think she's just super observant and intuitive.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's definitely one explanation for it.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 we. That doesn't, you know, have our laws here in our dimension, and that sometimes stuff just sort of spills over from that and we see the future or the past.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And if you're a skeptic, you probably just pulled a decent sized clump of your hair out of the side of your head at that one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Because this is something you can't prove. Obviously. It's like, completely. And of course they'll say. Exactly.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know.

[Josh Clark]

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 it's not currently capable.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And science goes. Doesn't work like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You know, at least with the electromagnetic spectrum explanation, it was pointing to something that we already know exists. Right. It's just that there. There's no way to show that we would be getting. How we would be getting information from it. Because the electromagnetic explanation.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It basically says if you compare it to other findings from esp, it makes even less sense. Because with esp, one of the hallmarks of it is that no matter whether you're out there outside of the studio thinking about wine or a dog or something and I'm picking up on it, or if you're in China and I'm here and we're doing the same thing, the signal doesn't weaken at all.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

No good.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So there's a lot of things wrong with the proposals of what ESP is.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or it popped up in me, you know, briefly, at least.

[Josh Clark]

And there's a. I mean, there's a lot of evidence of strange and unusual occurrences.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

That support the idea of esp. Yeah. This article gives a really good one about an 1898 book called Futility.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That was written by a guy named Morgan Robertson. Right. Mm. And in it, the guy details this book or this boat called the Titan.

[Chuck Bryant]

A ship?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, a ship boat. A big old boat.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Which is sailing across the Atlantic and hits an iceberg at night and sinks and a bunch of people die because there weren't enough lifeboats. Yeah. This is 1898. And if that sounds familiar, the Titanic did the same exact thing. The Titanic, not the Titan.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Did the same exact thing 14 years later.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Newfoundland on a starless night.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know about that.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 and he knew a bunch of this stuff. And it's not unreasonable to think at the time they wanted to build the biggest ships. And the word Titan would be a great name back then for a super big ship. And that sailing route was a common one, and there were icebergs, and April might have been a common month for that kind of voyage. So all of it can be explained away kind of. But it is definitely something you look at and go, ooh, interesting.

[Josh Clark]

It is interesting, and it's an 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 to over the years, that little kernel got erased and added to it was that this idea for this book came to him in a trance, which bolsters the ESP theory.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Is that true or has that just been added?

[Josh Clark]

I'm sure it was added over the years.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

Which is a big problem with this kind of anecdotal evidence is that, you know, it gets embellished and urban legends added. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Come on.

[Podcast Announcer]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So back to Ryan. He did some, like I said, in the 1930s. He started studying this stuff with one of my favorite inventions by his colleague Carl Zinner. Of course, if you've seen Ghostbusters, he was using. He was using a version of Zinner cards. The shapes weren't all exact. I Think there was one that was different in Ghostbusters, but the original Zinner cards were. It was A deck of 25 plain white cards with each of them had one of five symbols. A circle, a plus sign, a square, a star, five pointed star. And the three wavy lines like water, a river. Is that what that is?

[Josh Clark]

Maybe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. And the idea is that just like in Ghostbusters, you hold it up and ask the. You know, not showing them the card, 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right, right. But the person holding the card is supposed to be thinking about what they're seeing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

So that the other person, the target, the receiver, can pick it up telepathically.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I did. They have these online. I took the test yesterday and I went through the 25 deck and I only got six out of 25. And at the end it just said, you are not a psychic.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, really?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I thought it was kind of funny.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

What would chance be?

[Josh Clark]

I guess chance would be. If there's five different ones, it'd be 20%.

[Chuck Bryant]

And so this was six of 24 would be. Is that 25%?

[Josh Clark]

No, that's.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, no, that's less.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. No, you did 6 of 24. You did 24 or 25.

[Chuck Bryant]

25.

[Josh Clark]

So 5 of 25 would be chance.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, so I got one more.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, well.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I think like three of the first eight or so or six I got, and I was like, I've got the gift.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But I didn't know. Like it's randomly generated and so it's not like someone was on the other side thinking of that card. So I literally. I was like, what do I do? I was like, I'm just guessing.

[Josh Clark]

So that brings up some interesting stuff. Like there's evidence that when a machine is involved that there is no telepathy. There would only be clairvoyance. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So, I mean, if telepathy is you picking up what's in someone else's mind and a computer is mindless, then you shouldn't be able. What you were saying, like you should. It shouldn't. You should not be able to know what Zener card it's going to pick next. Right. But there have been investigations using computers and using machines that show above chance that there is some sort of weird.

[Chuck Bryant]

Interaction, like random number Generators.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. Yeah. So Princeton University has a department called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Department. Pair. Right, of course. And PEAR has been doing studies for a couple of decades. They've done millions of trials.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And basically they'll say, this is a random number generator, or 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, so you're thinking of the number, then you're. Okay, that makes sense.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, it's a computer.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Come on.

[Josh Clark]

It's on Princeton's website. And this is stuff that, like, is apparently accepted in the. In the scientific community, that the. The trials that they are running are so widespread and so repeatable and have been done so many times that the data that they're coming up with is. It's significant.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, Ryan, with his Zenercard experiments in the 30s, 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?

[Josh Clark]

He was the one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, how many? What was his percentage?

[Josh Clark]

He had one where he got. Remember how you got three in a row and you were like, oh, my God.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

He got 25 in a row once.

[Chuck Bryant]

What?

[Josh Clark]

25.

[Chuck Bryant]

Come on.

[Josh Clark]

No, I'm not kidding. He was also documented as selecting 558 correct. Out of 1850, which is the odds of that happening by chance, were 22 billion to one.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, really?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, some of them were. And then he corrected for that and the percentages went down, and then they. I know. Other scientists said that you are somehow influencing with your body tell.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, basically, you don't have a good enough poker face.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. In the earliest Ryan experiments with the Zener cards, he would hold the card up and he'd be making eye contact. Right. The guy. Yeah. The guesser would be like. Is it the wavy line? Yeah. He starts shaking his head almost Imperceptibly. But he. That's called sensory leakage, where you. The person who is holding the card knows where the card is. Somehow there's some detail about your face that when you do a thousand trials with somebody, they start to pick up on and it affects their guests. It influences their guests. So to correct for that, to control for that, what's it called? A sensory leakage.

[Chuck Bryant]

Gross.

[Josh Clark]

Isn't that gross? Yeah. They came up with something called the Ganzfeld experiment.

[Chuck Bryant]

Ah, yes, the German Ganzfeld. That means whole field in German. And that is when they started putting people, they would start depriving their other senses. Basically. 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.

[Josh Clark]

Special glasses or ping pong balls cut in half like Kermit the Frog.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. We've got the funding.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

So yeah, apparently later on in Ryan's experiments, after he started controlling for stuff, the percentages started to drop.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. He wore glasses and a white coat.

[Josh Clark]

Right. That was another one.

[Podcast Announcer]

But.

[Josh Clark]

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 Rhine, both dedicated their careers to establishing the field of parapsychology and really studying it rather than just walking away from it.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Was he or was he did. That was a huge criticism of him.

[Chuck Bryant]

Gotcha.

[Josh Clark]

He wanted to believe that he was a definite believer. He was quoted by. I don't know what the guy's deal 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 never published them. He didn't include them in the Gotcha. The results, which would definitely affect the number of correct hits.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

That was a huge criticism that's not good science at all. But he was definitely a believer, which is 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, a sensor that would correct negative hits for a little while during a trial.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So that all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits. And so. And then he plugged it back in. Well, this one guy saw what the guy was doing and went to Ryan and Ryan went to the guy, Levy, and said, did you do this? And Levy said, yes. He's like, you're fired. And just like threw the results away and all that. So he wasn't like he was a true believer, but he wasn't just some like, outright fraud.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, right.

[Josh Clark]

But he was and still is under the microscope as much as probably any researcher in all of academia ever has been.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, well, right after this break, we'll talk a little bit about what skeptics say about es.

[Josh Clark]

Stop your sh.

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[Chuck Bryant]

All right, Josh, one thing you'll hear skeptics say a extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I have to agree with them.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it is an extraordinary claim here. And so far there hasn't been extraordinary evidence. And one of the things I pointed to earlier that I think is what's going on. If you look at statistics, you look at 6 billion people on planet Earth and them thinking a gazillion things each day. And that is scientific, by the way.

[Josh Clark]

Gazillion.

[Chuck Bryant]

At some point somebody is going to think something that mirrors something that happens in the near future. And it's just chance and coincidence.

[Josh Clark]

I have a great example of that, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

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 piece of paper that I didn't need. And I realized like, we have no paper recycling here.

[Chuck Bryant]

So on my way back, not yet, that is, everyone out there is like, what kind of office would not have recycled?

[Josh Clark]

Right? We just said we have a 55 gallon drum that we throw stuff into. It catches on fire.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And then we send it out to sleep.

[Josh Clark]

We have a burning drum. That's what it's called.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, we're getting those soon.

[Podcast Announcer]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

You almost did. Your Izzy impression.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it was close. And so like I thought about it. That's pretty amazing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You know, but it was about 9 in the morning and this is a company wide email, so it'd be something that Izzy would probably knock out about that time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

The reason I was thinking of is because I was just at the printer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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 while this happened. That's what really kind of stood out to me. But if you really kind of look at it like there's a finite amount of things that people could think about in any given day, in any given context, in an office or something like that. Had I been a goat at a petting zoo and I went over and talked to the cow and the cow was writing the email about recycling bins. Maybe. But we're in an office, I'm talking to the guy about recycling bins. There's just a lot of stuff that you kind of. Once you take that into account, it becomes less amazing. Like the guy writing the Titan Titanic book.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You know what used to happen to me, now that I think of it, is I used to. And 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 gonna ring right before it rang.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, huh, that's weird.

[Josh Clark]

Sure, I know what you're talking about.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

But think about it in that respect too, you know, 15, 20 people. So was it you knew who was calling or just that the phone was about to ring?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, just that it was about to ring.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that is weird. You definitely do have esp.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, but only subconsciously, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's another explanation for it 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 up a whole other can of worms. You know, as far as, you know, how real is that kind of thing? But probably a little closer to reality is the idea that our attention isn't focused on everything that we're picking up at all times. Like, I see your beard and I see your shirt and everything. But I'm still also picking up, like, sensory information from, like, Jerry's computer that I can see in my peripheral vision or whatever. My attention isn't focused on it, but. But my brain is still receiving information. So the idea that our brains can put it together, all this information that we're not aware, consciously that we're receiving, but we're still getting impressions from it. That could be a great explanation for ESP as well.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you know what? Now that I think about it, the fact that it's never happened with my cell phone sort of makes sense because maybe it was a mechanical function. A landline.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Like you said, a click or a tick. But I think you meant like a click.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it wasn't even the newer model. This was back in the day when it was printed. Yeah. A ringing, like, bell.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

So maybe that does explain it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I've got another good example that I came across in researching this. Let's say that you and I are hanging out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And you're humming Baby I'm a Firework. Right. Just over and over again. I don't know that song, but I'm reading. Yes, you do.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I don't.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you do.

[Chuck Bryant]

Who is it?

[Josh Clark]

Katy Perry.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know Katy Perry.

[Josh Clark]

Anyway.

[Chuck Bryant]

Although I will have to say I did love that halftime show.

[Josh Clark]

It was great.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, it was. It was hysterical.

[Josh Clark]

What's up with the sharks being a meme now? I didn't think they were really significant.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did she look like she worked at Corn Dog on a Stick?

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

No, it's that place in the. Or Hot Dog on a Stick.

[Josh Clark]

Maybe.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was called that place in the mall where they wore those big, giant pinwheel killer. 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.

[Josh Clark]

So anyway, in this universe, you're well aware of Katy Perry and her song Firework and you're humming it to yourself. But I'm sitting there reading the New Yorker and I'm engrossed in it, and I don't notice that you get up to go make some nachos and you come back in and you catch my attention because you're coming back in with some nachos and they smell awesome. And now my attention is directed to you, and you're still humming Firework. Right, Right. And I'm like, I was just thinking about that song Firework. I had that in my head. How crazy we must be connected. I didn't realize that you had been humming it earlier. And beneath my awareness, I picked it up. Although once I became aware of that you were humming it, it seemed to me like I had esp.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, yeah. And that ties into another explanation, is that people who do seem to have that gift are just really, really hyper observant on minute details. Like the same people that can pick up on micro expressions. They might feel like they have the gift because they're just really in tune to what's going on around them and not just, you know, like a big lunkhead walking around.

[Josh Clark]

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 Darrell Bem.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

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 who say, yes, that definitely most likely accounts for almost all of it. Right. And that's good for us to be thinking about that. And that in and of itself deserves, like, academic inquiry and research. Right. But there are still some experiments that are being produced by guys like Darrell Bem that are showing some weird results that go beyond this kind of explanation.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Podcast Announcer]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Krolwich wrote this.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, from Radio Lab.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 does his work. Right.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And he's, again, a very respected psychologist. That's right. And this study of these experiments was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Which is a respected journal. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So the first one was a computer quiz they took 100 students, 50 males and 50 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Some kind of, you know, I was about to call it pornographic, but who knows? Maybe it's art. Nakedness.

[Josh Clark]

Eroticism.

[Chuck Bryant]

Eroticism.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Gross.

[Josh Clark]

Does that just make you feel like your dad's saying it or something?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Well, this room's too small for you.

[Josh Clark]

To say those kinds of things.

[Chuck Bryant]

So basically he would say, you tell.

[Odoo Advertiser]

Me.

[Chuck Bryant]

What you think you're going to see. And they were all hooked up to machines to read what's going on in their body, of course. And you would think it would be a 50, 50 result, but they actually got a 53.1% result for the. What Krulwitz calls erotic stimuli. And basically they. They think, or at least that's what BIM thinks, is that one possibility is if they think they're going to see something erotically stimulating, then it got passed back through time.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. That's kind of. His position is that retrocognition thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That somehow their future selves, who saw the erotic image was stimulated enough that that stimulation traveled backwards 3 seconds and influenced their choice because they would be.

[Chuck Bryant]

Slightly stimulated physiologically right before they guessed. And he said before the computer even chose which. Which one to show.

[Josh Clark]

Right. They. Right. They were making their choices often correct before the computer chose to show an erotic or non erotic image. And 53%, it doesn't sound like much, but crow. Which points out a couple of things. One, that when there was a control group that was shown just non erotic pictures.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

They did 49.8% correct. Which is chance. 50. 50.

[Chuck Bryant]

And they were all not happy.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

They were like, I don't want to be the control.

[Josh Clark]

They're like, can we get a little steamier in here? And he also pointed out that 53%, 53.1, to be specific, doesn't sound like much, but apparently that's a 0.2% chance. Where on a scale of between 0 and 1, where 0 is it's not gonna happen and 1 is that it's definitely gonna happen.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And apparently as far as correlation goes, or links between two things, something affecting another, a 0.2 is about the same as the link between aspirin and heart attack prevention, the link between calcium intake and bone mass, the link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.

[Chuck Bryant]

So things that are touted as, like, pay attention to this.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. So stuff that we accept. Yeah. If you're around secondhand smoke, you can get cancer from that. But this is probably poo pooed. Exactly. 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 of literature of these experiments, but it was a New Scientist article and it was pretty cool. In the comment section, somebody said, yeah, it's not reproducible, but a lot of science isn't reproducible. And it reminded me of our Scientific method episode where apparently a lot of trials that pharmaceuticals are based on aren't reproducible. Isn't it like 50% of them or something like that? Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which doesn't surprise me, of course.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. And then there was this other experiment that I need you to explain to me because I didn't understand it.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, you ready?

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, I got the first part, but I didn't. I didn't. It didn't make sense to me because.

[Josh Clark]

It'S a little mind blowing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So you know how, like, if you are studying something and you write it down.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

It gets in your brain a little more.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Okay. So Bem carried out a very simple experiment that did the opposite of that. First, he showed some people a bunch of words, 48 random words, I think nouns, like tree or something like that.

[Podcast Announcer]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And he told them to visualize it, though.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Right. So they saw all 48 words and thought about them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Not visualize the letters, but visualize the thing.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, see the tree in your head.

[Josh Clark]

Just to kind of try to memorize all 48 words.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Then the computer randomly selected 24 of those words. And then after they'd done that, Bem gave them a test of recall to see how many they recalled. Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

So the people had to type out the words they recalled.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Then after that, the computer randomly selected 24 of the 48 words for the people to type after they'd already taken the test of recall.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And those 24 words are the ones that people more consistently got right on the earlier test.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Gotcha.

[Josh Clark]

For the tests that they took before they learned them.

[Chuck Bryant]

That makes more sense.

[Josh Clark]

A little.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it is a little. But see, time travel melts my brain, too.

[Josh Clark]

Right? So this guy published this stuff in, like, 2010, and, like, it made a huge, huge splash. Huge criticism. The academic journal was criticized, and BEM was pilloried and all that, but he still put out these very reproducible, understandable, simple exercises that still showed, statistically speaking, there were some significant results that went beyond chance.

[Chuck Bryant]

So when it comes to debunking, esp. One thing that you're not going to, 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 basically trying to call out. And this is something completely different. But these onstage psychic shows, like Crossing.

[Josh Clark]

Over with John Edwards.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. 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. That's basically when you get up on stage and you say, sir, I'm sensing someone. You're having some trouble with another man in your life with the name of J. Or is it H or O? Maybe P. Or maybe it's P. Yes, P, My boss, Peter. Yes, yes, exactly. And that's all a cold reading is throwing out these really broad things that anyone can latch onto. So it's really easy to call those people out. And there's a guy, sort of guy famous for doing that. His name is James Randi, and he's famous for his offer of $1 million to anyone that can prove their psychic ability, which, of course, no one stepped up to do that. But then he gets pooh, poohed a little bit. Like, you're just making a mockery of trying to legitimately disprove something.

[Josh Clark]

And mockery is absolutely the right word.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And to me, the presence of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity. Yeah. Right. 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. Right. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And, yeah, the idea of lumping together John Edwards with Darrell Bem.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It's just that's, you know, fraudulent in and of itself.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. That's just. They call that theatrics. Just like the onstage theatrics of a stage psychic.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So I believe.

[Chuck Bryant]

I totally agree.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. You know, I do, too. I think there's a definite room for healthy scientific inquiry into just about anything, whether skeptics believe in it or not.

[Podcast Announcer]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

If you can get some funding for it, who cares?

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's my motto.

[Josh Clark]

You got anything else on esp?

[Chuck Bryant]

Let me think.

[Josh Clark]

No, I've got one more thing I found. I came across a 1990, I think, five Nightline with Ted Koppel, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, John Ronson.

[Josh Clark]

When it finally became declassified in 1995, Ted Koppel did like a 20 minute Nightline segment on it. Totally worth watching. It's some pretty softball questions. But 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 former CIA director. And it's just neat.

[Chuck Bryant]

Plus, you get to watch Koppel again, right?

[Josh Clark]

He was great news, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I miss those dudes. I miss. I was just thinking yesterday about Brokaw.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Rather.

[Chuck Bryant]

I was always a Brokaw man.

[Josh Clark]

Did you? I liked Peter Jennings. He was great.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I don't even.

[Josh Clark]

All of them were great.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't even have any idea who does Night in the news now. I don't watch it.

[Josh Clark]

It was Brian Williams until about a day ago.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did he get fired?

[Josh Clark]

He, like, got.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know, the whole kerfuffle. But he didn't get fired for that, did he?

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Interesting.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Twitter's involved, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

The Twitter takedown.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. 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 [e-mail] and since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Before we do listener mail, I just want to give a quick shout out to my buddy Isaac McNary. If you remember, I did a Judge John Hodgman episode with Emily in which I did a bad home renovation and this dude Stuff youf Should Know Listener from Kansas, carpenter, master carpenter, said, hey, man, I'll come and stay with you and help you do your project there. Right? And I said, this sounds crazy. And he actually came and did it, and it looks awesome.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And he's a super cool guy. And if you're in Kansas, near El Dorado, Kansas, there's no better guy to hire.

[Josh Clark]

The famous city of El Dorado, Kansas.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's El Dorado, actually. Okay, he has a point out. But not only is he a great carpenter and a cool guy, but he works with a nonprofit called Outreach Program, and you can find [e-mail] where they're basically feeding the world. They package food, and they get people together in a room and package these mass quantities of food to send to other countries and feed the hungry.

[Josh Clark]

Gotcha.

[Chuck Bryant]

And he's just a really good dude. So thanks to Isaac for that. And my kitchen was looking good. So again, for his nonprofit, that is outreachprogram.org and if you need a great carpenter and you're in Kansas, check out retrofit remodeling.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, listener mail. I'm gonna call this pronunciation help. Hey, guys, I'm a botanist and just wanted to 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.

[Josh Clark]

Thought I got that wrong.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is a mess of vowels. Guys, when you read it, you should just imagine you are spelling ace, as in ace. So when you read a plant family name, just break off the ace and read the first part and then spell ace. So the plant family for poison oak is Anacardia. Ce. So it's just Anacardiaceae. 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.

[Josh Clark]

What?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, she spelled out Anacardi.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, gotcha.

[Chuck Bryant]

The first two first letters from each of those words. Anyway, guys, I love your podcast. Find it endearing when you two puzzle out on pronunciations.

[Josh Clark]

Ace.

[Chuck Bryant]

Ace.

[Josh Clark]

That's good to know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So love you bunches. And that is from Jane, and she said P.S. in Europe, they pronounce plant families completely differently. Other parts, aec. Other parts of the US Might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is standard. And California.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, well, okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

What?

[Josh Clark]

Ac.

[Chuck Bryant]

Ac.

[Josh Clark]

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 is a way to put it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

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 stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

[Chuck Bryant]

For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

[Josh Clark]

You listen to your favorite shows.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Podcast Announcer]

Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Poynter, Chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you.

[Josh Clark]

100% of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it?

[Podcast Announcer]

Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Poynter on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.