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- [02:05]
Good morning.
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Welcome to today.
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Dr. Richard Wiseman
From back to school to tackling your.
- [02:09]
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To do list, the Today show is.
- [02:10]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Your best start to the day. It's a new season and every morning we're here to help you take it all along as the forecast calls for.
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Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Football all across the country, blockbuster stars, live concerts, and so much more.
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Dr. Richard Wiseman
Wake up to where it's all happening.
- [02:26]
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We're getting back to all of it and the best way to start is together.
- [02:30]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Watch the Today show weekday mornings at 7am on NBC.
- [02:36]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
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, 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, and our lives and emotions, and we laugh and we hate and we have beliefs that aren't true, and we argue with people and then 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. I read these things. And yet psychologists have this rather uncanny ability to take something as interesting and convert it into something quite dull.
- [03:53]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Hello and welcome to the Psychology podcast. Hello, I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist interested in the science of intelligence, creativity and human potential. Today we have Dr. Richard Wiseman on the podcast. Dr. Wiseman holds Britten's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and has published over 100 academic papers examining the psychology of magic and illusion, deception, luck and self development. Dr. Wiseman has written several popular psychology books, including the Luck Factor, Paranormality, why We see what isn't there, Quirkology, Shoot for the moon and Rip it up. The radically new approach to changing your life. I've been a longtime admirer of Dr. 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 Dr. Wiseman and I know you will enjoy listening to our discussion. So without further ado, I bring you Dr. Richard Wiseman. Professor Richard Wiseman, it is so, so good to have you on the psychology podcast. Finally.
- [05:02]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Pleasure, pleasure to be here and greetings from a not very sunny Edinburgh in Scotland, which is where I find myself.
- [05:09]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
It's not sunny, but I do love Edinburgh. I love it.
- [05:12]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
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.
- [05:30]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Wonderful. Well, we have so many areas of mutual interest. I have great interest 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.
- [05:45]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yes, yes. The interconnected world of magic. Yeah, it's remarkably small world. It's incredible.
- [05:51]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
It is remarkably small. And everyone's trying to make sure that we keep the secrets. Keep the secrets. But also psychology and the psychology of success. That's a very common area of interest. Not common. That's a mutual area of interest of ours. Maybe some of the. We're going to talk today about some of the unexpected things that people 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 doesn't matter so much. So that'd be great to have that conversation. So that's all just preamble, just setting the stage.
- [06:28]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Setting the stage, letting people know what's gonna happen. Yes, it's very important. Yes.
- [06:33]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, yeah. Well, you're a lifelong entertainer, so I wanna start there a little bit to your childhood because you were a street performer when you were what, like 12?
- [06:44]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
No, a little bit older than that. I got into magic when I was probably eight or nine, something like that. And via my grandfather, who showed me a very good magic trick. He only knew one magic trick, but it's a very good one. The coin that would disappear and appear in a little sort of nest of boxes. And so I kind of badgered him every weekend to 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 a local magic club and then went to study psychology because of magic. Actually, I read a book that said it's handy if magicians are likable. And so therefore you should read how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which. Which is an amazing book. I mean, it's. It' 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 went and studied Psychology at University College London, which is right in the middle of London. And the reason for that is 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 sort of summer breaks, I would go and do street entertaining down there. I guess they had in my sort of early teens and I was pretty awful. I was pretty bad at it. It's a hard way of making a living because people can walk off, you know, if they don't like what you're doing, they just, they wander off. And they did in large numbers when I was. Was doing street entertaining. So I did that. And then we'll probably 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 PhD position which would be perfect for you studying the psychology of magic up in Edinburgh. And I often think, well, you know, if somebody hadn't put that poster up or you 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 magician. And so I came up to here and studied psychology and magic for four years. That's my PhD and then after that went back down to University Hertfordshire and did some of the research, which I suspect you may have read about. So that's my kind of career in terms of magic and psychology coming together.
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Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
I love it. What was the name of your advisor?
- [09:33]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Up here is Professor Robert Morris, who was the Koestler professor of parapsychology. So Bob was, I don't know if 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 out. 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, most magicians are. I was deeply skeptical. And yet 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.
- [10:35]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
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.
- [10:48]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
No, that's definitely true. Yeah, when I was doing it, it's probably about 50 people. Now there's probably about 20 people around the world. So yes, it's, it's not an area that attracts many people.
- [10:59]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
It's not an area that attracts many people. Yet, like if there is something to this, then like it, it's like the most important thing that, that, that's the interesting thing about this is like it, it's, you know, it's the, the most fringe area. But let's say a psychologist does someday actually find something that replicates within the parent because yet no one's replicating this. But let's say someone actually replicates. Well then it's like, wait a minute, hold on. Maybe we should now focus on this.
- [11:29]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, no, that, that's true. It has the, the opportunity or the, the possibility of, of revolutionizing exactly how we see the mind and, and so on. But you do need evidence, good evidence. I don't believe that evidence is there for extrasensory perception. But Bob's argument, even back then, the, this would have been the late 80s, early 90s, 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 and have lives and emotions and we laugh and we hate and we have beliefs that aren't true and we argue with people and then we get on with people and so on, 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. I read these things. And yet psychologists have this rather uncanny ability to take something as interesting and convert it into something quite dull.
- [13:02]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
You're so right. I mean literally, you're the professor of public understanding at your university.
- [13:11]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yes, yes.
- [13:13]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
And you know, like you literally, I've never heard of that. Maybe Richard Dawkins. The only other time I've ever heard of someone who was a professor of like public, you know, why the public should care about something.
- [13:26]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, no, Richard started, he was pub to understanding science, I think.
- [13:30]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Right.
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Dr. Richard Wiseman
And then when I got my professorship I went with Public Understanding of Psychology because it allowed me to, 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 alive.
- [14:39]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
But you did write a book on helping people with their memory. Memory.
- [14:42]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
I did. I forgot about that. Yes. I didn't. Ironic.
- [14:46]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, that's ironic.
- [14:47]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Crazy. Yes. So, yeah, a short book on memory, but again it was about how to improve your memory. Right. It wasn't about, you know, the intricacies of, of how memory systems long term. Exactly.
- [15:01]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
That's right.
- [15:02]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
That's it.
- [15:03]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Well, I know I, I find the, well, I definitely find the topics you study interesting for sure. I, I remember. It's, it's just a shame in psychology that we don't in grad school promote people more or encourage, I should say encourage 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. I'm not tenured yet. But I mean, that was true of.
- [15:48]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Me when I finished my by parapsychology stuff in 92. I was looking for a job. Turns out nobody wants to employ a parapsychologist or somebody who's done a work. And so it is that, that is totally true, that the system is set up for a certain type of psychology where you 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 why? Well, why are you doing anything? Quite frankly, what makes something meaningful? And when you ask that psychologists, their answer is, well, because I publish journal articles and I get grants that, that, that's the end point. The end point isn't to understand or to celebrate humanity. And, and, and so the number of times people are confused when you go, well, let's just forget about the articles and the, the why are you studying this? And, and people just, psychologists look kind of a bit bewildered and go, no, I'm just doing it because that's to get those publications, get those grants. 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.
- [16:55]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Well, that would be nice. Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah, sign me up for that club. I view you as part of a tradition that includes James Randi, the Amazing Randy and includes Banachek, but it's a smaller club than that because you're a psychologist who is formally, I mean, I put you in this sort of tradition because they, you know, James Randi tried to test, to see some of this bullshit, but he didn't really do rigorous double blind, you know, he made for tv. Look, I'm going to show you how I'm smarter than you, that you're dumb, that you lied and that, look, I'm the amaz, Randy. But you know, with all due respect, I, I have a lot of respect for him, but that's what the TV show is about. Yeah.
- [17:47]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
I mean, no, I'm not quite the same as that.
- [17:50]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
I mean, like, look at me.
- [17:52]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, I suppose in terms of going back, I'd probably close to Ray Hyman, Jim Alcock, 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, 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 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 debunk, where he was able to overcome that. And he was great. And some of his 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 good. Big, big fan of his. Of his work. Banachek is wonderful as well. Really sort of talented. Have you ever seen Banachek 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 Hyman, Jim Alcock, who come more from that. That kind of tradition.
- [19:13]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
And I was very careful in 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 Darrell, 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 than he is.
- [19:37]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, I mean, Daryl's not particularly critical now. I mean, he starts off, I think, being quite skeptical. He's a very good magician, which is actually taught, I think, by Sloudini and does some great magic. Yeah, I think that's right. Certainly I've seen him do Sledini, which we should explain to people is a very particular type of magic. I've seen him do those sorts of routines. And Darrell's great published 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 looks at the data, pre analyzed it or he's not reporting everything or whatever it is. And then other people went, hold on a minute. That may be true of that parapsychological work, but it's also true 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 at our own studies. And now that's become a huge movement. And because of that movement, psychologists now are talking about a thing called pre registration, 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 15 years, many, many years ago. I mean, probably 20 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.
- [21:16]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah. Just on a nerdy note, pre registration is kind of like mentalism. I mean, aren't they making a prediction? We predict this will be our hypothesis, correct?
- [21:27]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
That's right, yes. But unlike mentalism, it's quite hard to change that prediction. So.
- [21:33]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
That's right.
- [21:36]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
So yeah, it's an attempt to. To kind of sort of.
- [21:39]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
If it goes right. If it goes right, you know that.
- [21:42]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
It looks impressive, you make a big fuss. That's right, yes. Yeah. So Daryl contributed to that. And actually, weirdly, there's another overlap there because before he go into parapsychology, Daryl 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 and 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 called the as if Principle and states. So I interviewed Darryl for that when I did that book. It was odd talking to him entirely about that and not about parapsychology because that's. But no, he's. Yeah, it's great.
- [22:35]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Have you ever talked to him about Paris? Because you wrote a rep. You. You have a study, right, that found it didn't replicate. Were you an author on that? A co author?
- [22:43]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We didn't replicate stuff. No, I've spoken to Daryl, but we did summer Schools together in America on parapsychology. So I know reasonably well and very cool. Yeah, this is what I mean. We within parapsychology, I don't see eye to eye with most parapsychologists in terms of whether this stuff is true, but you have to sit down the room and have the conversation with somebody without shouting. And 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 it is, not gonna say who it is. And they, 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. Both of them cut me dead. I said, never mind about that. What did you hate? What can I change tomorrow? And 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 something that we don't embrace easily saying to somebody, yeah, but how can I get, how I get better? What do you disagree with about 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.
- [24:19]
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- [27:23]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Well, that's an important lesson about success. I mean, if you look at anyone who's really successful, you look at like even, you know, famous basketball players. I feel like that was Kobe Bryant's mentality. You know, it was like, you know, like always wanting to change and improve.
- [27:36]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
It's hard to do, though. It's easy to say to do when 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 didn't you like? What did you. What can I do better? It's hard to do. It's easy to say and hard to do.
- [27:54]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
It's true. Especially the more personal the comment is.
- [27:57]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, totally. Yeah.
- [27:59]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
No, for sure. So where are we at with the evidence on this? So I try to look at. I started with your 99 paper. Does psi exist? Psi. How's it pronounced?
- [28:12]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Psi. Yeah.
- [28:13]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Does psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer. I saw your eyes, by the way. Try to think all the way back to 99. That was my reading.
- [28:23]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Well, this happens a lot. Okay. 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-90s, and I was thinking, I can't remember. I don't even remember writing the book, let alone the contents of it. So. Yeah, particularly with papers like that. But I do remember that that's the meta analysis studies.
- [28:47]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Just in case you forgot, I wrote a sentence from the abstract. The studies failed to confirm his main effect of participants scoring above chance on the ESP task. So you looked at a whole bunch of. Now, that was before the bem, the one that made the big splash. Right. Which was more recent?
- [29:08]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
No, I think that is.
- [29:09]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Oh, oh, was that. Was that. Oh, that was. Maybe that was. That was a direct replication of that.
- [29:15]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Now we are getting into stuff. I can't remember. So I thought that paper that you got there. What's the title of it again?
- [29:20]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Does Psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information Transfer.
- [29:25]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
That's the meta analysis of stuff. Yeah, the BEM stuff is about feeling the future, which is much later on. So that was about the game. Yes, that's right. So that. That one, I think, if I'm right, is. 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. That paper. I think it's still one of my most cited papers because so many people disagreed with it and got into arguments about it. So it's a very contentious paper. And actually one of the reasons why I left the first field. I don't do much parapsychology now because it was so unpleasant to be consistently opening your email and there's like criticism and an argument and I was going to conferences and arguing about it, and after a while I 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. And um, because after about 10, 12 years in parapsychology, I thought I'd said everything that I needed to say. And, and you know, like religion, these beliefs really do matter to some people. And, and so the debates do get quite heated sometimes.
- [30:43]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
It does. And you know, there's such a popularity right now of the telepathy tapes. And I wanted to get your thoughts on that.
- [30:50]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, I said I don't know anything 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, the unseen unsinkable rubber duck hypothesis, you know, you keep on batting it down, it keeps on coming back in different forms.
- [31:06]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, well you do keep batting it down. You took on their gangs felt ESP studies. Can you just describe the methodology of a gangs felt ESP studies? So someone listening to know what a what, how do we test for this stuff?
- [31:17]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Okay, so testing for this stuff is complicated. With a Ganzfeld you 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 Ganzfeld 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 is 20 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 25% hits. One in four of those trials should be what's called a hit. When you run those studies, some people getting 32%, 35% and that was statistically significant, that is suggested that psychiability existed. Our analysis didn't show that. And that's where it all started to get a little bit nasty. But you know, Gansfield studies are still going on and the debate is still going on.
- [32:27]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Oh, the debate is still very much going on. And people will still, people will keep pointing out to me, but what about JB Ryan's work? What about jb And I read Reach of the Mind. It's actually One of my favorite books, I have it 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 I, and the argument I keep getting from, from the scientists who are also believers, you know, is that, you know, just 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 meta analysis can strike that from the record. So I find it hard like what to do with that. Like, how could we ever progress as a 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 chance doesn't mean that we didn't find it.
- [33:29]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, so if I understand your question correctly, it's how you, I mean a lot of parapsychologists have had personal experience of this, this stuff. So they've had an experience which they think proves psy and after that they're out to prove it. And experiments are a way of doing that and investigating this alleged ability. So 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, Bem did his studies that we spoke about earlier on. Since then he's tried to replicate it quite rightly 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 those 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 or 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 under certain conditions, you can make certain conclusions, but it will take some time.
- [35:00]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, but I don't even know if there's anything you would find evidence wise that would convince the believers, you know.
- [35:07]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, I mean, it has to be true. Let's be said, the same might be true of the skeptics. No matter what evidence you give them, sometimes they won't change.
- [35:13]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
I'm glad you said that. I'm glad you said that too.
- [35:15]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
You know, we like our entrenched positions and it probably, you know, whenever I was doing that stuff, public stuff, I was always seeing it like a kind of curve where you had the extreme believers one end, 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, J.P. ryan was what, 1930s, 1940s? We was 100 years on from that. We're still having the same debates, but we'll, we'll slowly get there, as you will all psychology.
- [35:54]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
We will. And I appreciate your very rigorous research. I really liked your paper, Think of a Card. I like the title, A Retrospective Analysis. The subtitle is a little more boring, but A Retrospective Analysis of a classic ESP experiment from 2021. You found the results do not provide evidence for psychic functioning, but they do suggest, and 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 fellow magicians, females like queen of hearts and men love ace of spades. Is that still true?
- [36:27]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
I don't know. We did a gender split there, but what we were showing there was that somebody did a very similar thing in the 19. I think it was 20s. I think society for Psych Research did it, where they asked lots of people to name a playing card. So we had that data and then we also had the data from 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, that time. That the problem it gives magicians is you are right that when you say name a card, people tend to say queen of hearts, ace of spades. Yeah, but that the issue, the issue is that I think people also know they're commonly called cards. And. 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 an obvious one. 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 with mentalism. Oh, but everyone says that is one of those, those kind of methods.
- [37:31]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
So this is. I mean, you really are consistently finding in lots of different methodologies, lots of different ways there really is not a psychic effect. But you do find some things that I still think are extraordinarily interesting, maybe just as 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 talk? You did extensive. You looked at intelligence, you know, like cognitive ability, critical thinking, belief in psychic ability. What is the type of person. Can you just outline the type of person who really kind of sees the supernatural everywhere they look?
- [38:12]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, it's not just myself. Lots of people looked at that, that literature and continue to look at it. The cognitive stuff, certainly in terms of, if you want to use the word intelligence or IQ doesn't tend to bear out what. 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, you know, widely believed in Western society at least. And second, you 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, 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 if you are creative, you go, oh yes, but a ship coming in, that represents opportunity in my dream world. And look, I was offered this job. A 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. It's not far off of what it is now. So in the UK we hit about 50, 55 consistently for belief in ESP, about 40% for ghosts. We like our ghosts over here. And those figures haven't changed much when I was looking at it for about a decade.
- [40:21]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
There's a new study, I don't know if you saw a really hot off the press study conducted by Paul Silva and his colleagues on who seems to enjoy magic.
- [40:32]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yes.
- [40:32]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
And they found two very different kinds of people. So on one hand you get the skeptical, rational folk as a subclass and then also on the other hand you get what you're describing, the more superstitious paranormal folklore. But both seem to equally love it, but for different reasons. Probably.
- [40:53]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
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 of course, as a magician you have to appeal to, to both sets. And I think magicians themselves tend to fall into the latter class. They tend to be about method, 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, 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, can't be that. 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 to influence and influence people is how do you do magic and remain likable? I mean the, the, yeah, the contract is, you know, I, 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? And as a friend, I would normally tell them anything like that and instead I have to go, oh, I can't tell you. So I think that's the challenge for magicians is actually to remain likable whilst doing this weird activity of essentially lying to people.
- [42:53]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
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.
- [43:02]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
I think it's more, more than half the battle.
- [43:05]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah.
- [43:05]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
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.
- [43:14]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Well.
- [43:15]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
And it's difficult.
- [43:17]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
I don't know. What are your thoughts? What do you think of mentalism? I will say I'm obsessed. I love mentalism and I, and just personally, it suits me and I find it gets a better reaction than, than the card tricks, but I just find that nothing beats the reaction of like, hey, can I guess your favorite movie?
- [43:36]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Why do you think that is?
- [43:38]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
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, 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. Yeah, 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 am honest, I'm. I don't say like, oh, I'm psychic. You know, I don't, I don't say I'm psychic. But it almost. Sometimes when I say that some, 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's actually psychic. I don't know why that is what they would say. But anyway, so there's something, there's something else going on with mentalism in terms of how it hits people on 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.
- [44:49]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
I think that's right. I think there'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 going to put a coin in 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. Whether 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 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 they're just on a rig and they're being held up by wires, it's not really a trip. I would be devastated.
- [46:32]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yes.
- [46:33]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
That's not the experience I'm paying for. And I think mentalism 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 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 public did believe in spirits and seances, well, the mentalists were doing that, Ernest. 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.
- [47:16]
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- [50:20]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, it's very culturally relevant right now with the telepathic tapes, the telepathy tapes in popularity. I feel like, I don't know, I feel like mentalism is like cool again, you know, it's like it's back. We're. We're back, baby.
- [50:35]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
And also depend on performance. I mean, over here we have Derren Brown. 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.
- [50:48]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Do you know Darren?
- [50:50]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Oh, you know, very well. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.
- [50:52]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
That's amazing. I told him.
- [50:55]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
I mean, his first special, if you look back to the very first one, really, he's filmed at the university. Yeah, yeah. He does the stunt demonstration with twins. I'm there and then I, I helped out with a couple of the TV programs and, and stuff. And he's. He's astonishing. It's not. I actually thought I invented a mind reading item and I'm not, I don't do mentalism. But I showed it to him and it was involved a 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.
- [51:29]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
He's so intelligent, you know, as well. Yeah, yeah. That's so cool. When I used to teach cognitive psychology at nyu, I would show videos of his stuff and that was way back when I didn't even know anything about how he actually did his stuff. So he actually fooled me. He actually fooled me in a sense. Like, I used an example of like, how we can really influence people's minds by meticulously, you know, like putting things in the environment, you know? You know what I'm saying? But so anyway.
- [52:01]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, but. But once you've got that explanation, so, so I, I've. You and I have been to a lot of magic conventions. Yeah. There's a very big one coming up next week in, in this country. At Blackpool, I will see. Yeah, 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 40s, 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. Doesn't need to be any better because no one's looking for a trick. They're there to commune with the spirits.
- [52:40]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
So true.
- [52:41]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
And so you. They don't need to be good magicians or good tricksters is the magicians that need to be because everyone knows they're watching a magic trick. So it's kind of interesting that the power of. 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 that out then.
- [53:07]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
What a terrific point. You know, people are. I mean, seances. What are they called? Psychics. Psychic seances. Yeah.
- [53:14]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
We've done. I've done loads of fake seances. Probably 100 sort of darkroom seances. I love doing them.
- [53:20]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Well, the ones that professionally, you know, do it.
- [53:23]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah.
- [53:24]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
They have it easier because their audience is coming to them with just, you know, no question. This is true.
- [53:30]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah.
- [53:30]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Right.
- [53:31]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah.
- [53:31]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
You know, it's. That's far better than having to perform at a drunk, you know, bar with the skeptical, you know, girl who's like, oh, okay, well, I'm gonna change my mind now and try to fool you totally.
- [53:43]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
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 reading, whatever it is, they are there to do that work for you. Magicians would never get away with that stuff because they're attending it in. 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 their switch frames.
- [54:14]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
That is so funny and interesting about humans. Just that fact. Yeah. So you don't think we can commune with the dead.
- [54:24]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
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 Nyman, 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 luminous objects moving around in the dark and so on. So much fun using 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 stuff.
- [55:11]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
My friend Spencer Greenberg did a large scale study about astrologists 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? It's not like they're trying to pull a fast one over others. And so I said, now do psychics is what I said. He's like, okay, 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 when I 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 I don't know what it is in my head. It just seems so obvious that if I'm doing trickery, I know I'm doing trickery. I can't imagine myself doing trickery, not knowing it. But there seems to be a case where a lot of psychics believe they're psychics. And why do they believe they're psychics?
- [56:20]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Well, they're not doing tricks per se. Most of those were doing readings. I think when you get to like say physical phenomena, the seance room phenomena, then they are tricking people and they would know about that. Most of them are doing reading. So what happens there? Somebody sits down, you come up with a reading and the person goes, my goodness, that's incredibly accurate.
- [56:38]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Right?
- [56:39]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
It's. And you could easily see how that gets internalized of, oh, I've got some kind of gift then, because the feedback you're getting. So my answer 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 put 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 baloney. 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, hit, hit, 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.
- [57:41]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Why this is fascinating insight, so thank you. Why are they ethically okay with that?
- [57:48]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Well, I mean, mentalists, you ask the same question to them. You know that they are often, they don't say to people, this is a trick. They'll say, I'm doing X, Y and Z, and try and keep it away from the trick work.
- [58:01]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
But psychics aren't entertainers.
- [58:03]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Well, that. That's the greater good argument. So the argument is for some greater. Well, that's a. 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 would 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 National Health System over here. They give somebody attention for 20 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.
- [58:46]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
I see. So do 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?
- [59:02]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
I wouldn't say there's no way. Oh, there'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 like, it's like a psychology experiment. You test 200 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 and tell you all about future. Dead easy to test. And normally completely unconvincing the results of those tests.
- [59:52]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Oh, it's a little sad. Like I want there to be. I want this to exist. I think it'd be interesting.
- [60:00]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
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's nice 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.
- [60:21]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
That's true. I, 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 PhD was implicit learning. I think there are some people who really do. Like I was curious, like IQ tests have been studied, but is there in an implicit intelligence that are some people generally better at unconscious pattern recognition and or non conscious pattern recognition? How does that correlate with iq? So that was my cognition paper was showing a zero correlation between the two.
- [60:54]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah.
- [60:54]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
And I was like the first to really adopt those implicit learning tasks in the cognitive science literature for individual differences. So that was my dissertation.
- [61:04]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
So you tell me, what's an implicit learning task?
- [61:07]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
1. One would be like the serial 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 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 a reoccurring, very complex pattern. And that's one example. Another thing would be like Arthur Reber's artificial grammar learning task, where some people, after being exposed to lots of different fake grammar, actually learn the principles, better statistical learning, you know, is how other people would in the literature describe it years ago.
- [62:00]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
I don't know if this counts or not. It's not my field. I did an ESP thing with an entire class where I had a 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.
- [62:18]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yes.
- [62:18]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
And then slowly thought that. And you can see individual 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 don't. That would count as the same thing.
- [62:31]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
It would, it would. It really would. That could been another task that, you know, we added to our battery. So at the general level. Yeah. People show there are significant effects of posturing and there are individual differences. Both are true at the same time. So. So I am just thinking that I really do think there are some people who are more intuitive. Whatever, you know, like, I think that'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 was like. So I have, I have something 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 implicit learning and openness to experience. The personality trait, which was the one.
- [63:25]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
I was talking about before with belief in psychic stuff. Yeah.
- [63:29]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yes. But you meet someone with 3, 4 standard deviations above the mean and openness to experience and it is a different kind of person.
- [63:37]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yes.
- [63:38]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
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 the. Their psychic level, but they're picking up on lots of nuances.
- [63:55]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
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.
- [64:05]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah.
- [64:05]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
And so I, 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. I know 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. I, you know, I often say when I teach public speaking, silence is odd in a group because bored 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 interest. So intuitively I'll go, I have to make this more interesting now because I can hear the group aboard or actually I can take them down that route because I can hear that they're interested. I'm not thinking about that, I'm just intuitively doing it. So yeah, absolutely. I think intuition is really important. I think practically, well, at least 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 so on. So we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water, I think.
- [65:16]
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- [68:21]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, I agree. Are you familiar with Diane Powell's research?
- [68:25]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
No, I'm not, no.
- [68:27]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Diane Hennessy Powell, she studies the science of esp and she's one of the ones who was featured on the Telepathy Tapes podcast. I just had her on my podcast so I could send you my chat with her as well. She seems to be pretty. 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 the way I am. But yeah, but Dr. Powell, she really believes there's something here. But when we talked about this picking up the nuances stuff, it's interesting because a lot of these, there's something special here with Autistic savants that I think is worth further investigation because they're completely non verbal. I think their implicit learning ability is. I did some research at Cambridge University of Cambridge on this topic and I'm going to collaborate with Simon Baron Cohen to test some of these kids, you know, from the telepathy tapes. Because I think there's something, there's something, there's something here. It's really interesting where if you're completely non verbal, if you're completely. Yeah, completely non verbal and you really hone this incredible ability to just be observant to regularities and patterns. You're not like encumbered by language so much. It can really, you can become like, you know, talk about Erickson. Ten years of deliberate practice. You could become such an expert in something that it can really blow people's minds. And you found in the telepathy 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. I kept bringing that up. I was like, I want to double click on that because there's something about that. If I spend enough time with anyone, you start to find. Couples start to complete each other's sentences. They don't call themselves psychics. Right. They, it's. They, 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 mom so well.
- [70:24]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
It's interesting. I mean, I don't know that work. The, the, 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, they are less able to detect lies in their partners, 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 it's 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.
- [71:01]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, for sure. Just to conclude this interview with success in life. A big.
- [71:06]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Which we haven't touched on at all after saying we would do at the beginning.
- [71:10]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Yeah, I'm happy to do it now for a little bit, a couple minutes because I am really fascinated with the 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 through, like just act already, you know, and can you kind of explain to me the difference between positive thinking and positive acting? And are you kind of. Yeah. Like why do you think action is so important for success in life?
- [71:36]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
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 works. Small change here, or if I'm doing one of the Quickology videos. But you know what? Nothing beats getting out a deck of cards 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 some of the most successful people, they do, they don't just talk about it. Many, many, many, many, many years ago I set up in a tree house with a good friend of mine, Adrian Owen, now a very famous neuroscientist.
- [72:25]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
I know, I know.
- [72:25]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Adrian, Adrian. I go back to ucl, we were undergraduates together and we shared a flat together. We did the stuff in Covent Garden, was joined with Adrian, it was Dublin.
- [72:35]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Wonderful, wonderful.
- [72:36]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
So we sat there and we sat up in this tree house on our first holiday together in the south of England and we're talking about various plans and we, we made a pact which is that if we mentioned an idea three times we had to do it and that we've, both of us have stayed with that throughout our lives. It's been 30 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. Worse that happen is you'll fail and you'll learn something. You know, I did a show at the Edinburgh Fringe here last year in August and I don't normally do magic shows. Well, the first one wasn't my best show to put it mildly, but you have to do 10 in a row and by the time you hit show 10 it was pretty tight. And I could have sat at home imagining this wonderful show and how funny and hilarious it's going to be. Doesn't matter until you're out there doing it.
- [73:54]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
That's when 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 super interested in integrating your work with Darren Brown's work on happiness. You know, the psychology of happiness.
- [74:08]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yes.
- [74:09]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
There's a lot of commonalities there.
- [74:10]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yes. Yeah. And it's great, 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. 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 what's great about psychology is you often combine those two. If you love horse riding, we can do the psychology of horse riding. If you love running, do the psychology of running. And you'll be the only person in the world that has those, probably those two things combined. Therefore, you become an expert and you'll spend longer doing it than anyone else. I spent all my life looking at 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 18, 19, and I said to Max, I'm thinking of being a professional magician. He said, what's your other option? I said, psychologist. And he said, combine them. You'll become one of the very few people looking at psychology and magic. Boy, that was great advice.
- [75:31]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
I feel. You're giving me chills. You're giving me chill. You're. You're very. You're a very inspirational figure to me. You really are. Richard. 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. There's a lot of potential there to use mentalism to unlock people's potential or, like, show people that, like, you know, there's, you know, the reach of their mind. As JB Ryan would say, well, probably.
- [76:11]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
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 start talking a really energetic way when they're talking about that and tapping that energy and bringing it into psychology, you know, is one way of making it meaningful and probably means a far more successful career. Yeah. Working on a new fringe 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 optical illusions, particularly ambiguous optical illusions, the kind of duck rabbit things. There's a new take on those. So, yes, still doing all this stuff after, after all these years. But thank you for your kind comments throughout this. That's very kind.
- [77:13]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
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 and manipulating perception by putting things closer and farther away y the Quecology channel.
- [77:30]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
And yeah, we did that when. Yeah, in the sort of infancy of YouTube actually. And now I meet people in their sort of mid-20s and go, I watched it as a kid. Makes me feel terribly old but delighted that it's inspiring anyone.
- [77:41]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
Well, anyway, thank you so much, Richard. Thank you for your time today. Thanks for being on the podcast and I'll guess I'll catch you on the secret magic Facebook groups.
- [77:49]
Dr. Richard Wiseman
Yeah, please, please do. Lovely to chat to you. Thank you.
- [77:57]
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- [79:26]
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman
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- [80:27]
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