We've heard a lot of extraordinary claims from a lot of people at this festival, and
they're fairly common. We've chatted with a bunch of our students about some of the
extraordinary claims they've experienced, and I'm sure people at home have had some similar experiences.
One of the ones that I remember: it was a student who said that she was walking through
a shopping mall, and it just so happened that this was the anniversary of her grandmother's
death. While she's walking through the shopping mall, over the loud speakers, there's music
playing, but midway through a song, it cuts out and it shifts to her grandmother's favourite song.
Another common one is premonition, so dreaming about something and then it coming true, and
this isn't innocuous stuff like dreaming about an apple and then seeing an apple the next
day. These are really specific things that they're remembering: dreaming about a crow
jumping from tree to tree and then seeing it the next week, or dreaming about an old
friend and having them appear on your doorstep the next day.
That's right. This is our job here. It's to figure out why people believe weird things.
It's not enough just to say, as we said before, that people like to believe in weird things
or they take comfort in the paranormal. That doesn't really explain anything.
Instead what we're trying to do is to focus on the cognitive mechanisms, to focus on explanations
in terms of perception, attention, memory. One of these that things we're going to be
dealing with is ambiguity, which is really important. We've touched on it a few times
in the course. Last episode we talked about the Necker cube, the spinning dancer, and
a bunch of different things, bistable illusions.
This is a really nice example. The figure here, the letter B or the number 13 is ambiguous.
In the context of A and C it looks like a B. In the context of 12 and 14, it looks like
a 13. Again, this is two different ways that you can interpret this event.
Another example is by Tom Gilovich. He provides a smiling person. Now the smiling person can
either be interpreted as being friendly. It's a genuine smile, if you like the person.
If you don't like the person, you might interpret it as a smirk, as being malicious somehow,
or they're up to something. But it's exactly the same smile being interpreted in two different
ways, which is a little bit more realistic.
Yes, so that's ambiguous information. I think there's a second factor going on, called multifaceted
expectations. Yes, with the A, B, C and the 12, 13, 14, there are really only two ways
of seeing it. Just like the spinning ballerina: it spins left or it spins right. The Necker
cubes pops out or comes back in. They're two dimensions. They're two ways of seeing it.
But much of the objects that we deal with and the events that happen in our everyday
lives are not two-dimensional. They're not even three-dimensional. They're multidimensional.
They're multifaceted.
In one episode, we talked about talent, and there are several different ways that can
be viewed. We talked about some things as innocuous as a job interview and how many
different ways that can be viewed. Dealing with that complexity and ambiguity, there
are so many ways that these things can be viewed. That's when our pattern recognizers
really kick in. We really see what we expect to see when we have multi-dimensions.
That's right. And the two can operate together. You can have ambiguity and these multifaceted
expectations working in conjunction.
One really nice example of this was when we visited the horoscope booth at the MindBodySpirit
Festival. Now they prepared these personalized portraits that, on the basis of where the
planets are and how they're interacting in the sky—and these portraits that they create
are anything but personalized. They're extremely multifaceted and extremely ambiguous. One
of the examples that they provide was from the sign of Venus. Now it says, "A beautiful
mind and a mind for beauty."
There is somebody who has a beautiful mind and a mind for beauty. You can read here,
when it comes—I can't even see it—when it comes to personal relationships, you tend
to be rather idealistic. You seek a lover who is both intelligent and good-looking.
That's because it's in Libra, in the Fourth House. You're also going to have—it has
something to do with your home. Your home is also going to be that way as well. So Venus
is very important in this persons' home life. Their house has to be beautiful. Whereas if
it was in the First House, they themselves would be quite beautiful—they would be very
focused on their own appearance. Whereas here, this person here, because of the position
in the sky, their home is where they focus their sense of beauty on or their sense style.
And because it's in Libra, they probably have a very good sense of style because that's a Libran thing.
Now these portraits that they've put together are really anything but personalized. They
would really apply to anybody. I mean, what do you mean by idealistic, or good-looking,
or charming? These are very general statements. As Richard Wiseman said, these are called
Barnum statements, or the Barnum effect is the fact that there's something for everybody,
that there's an enormous amount of overlap between your own characteristics and these
sort of statements, and anybody who's reading them would be able to find something of themselves
in them. They're often very flattering as well to say that you have untapped potential
or that you're an independent thinker. Who doesn't want to think that about themselves?
Yes. Another factor that's operating, I think, is multiple endpoints. Now we need to think
about this when we're trying to assess the validity of these claims. The analogy is casting
a wide net, catching a big fish in that wide net, and then claiming that you caught it with a spear.
This is very common in psychic prediction. A psychic may say something like, "I see an
older gentleman in your family is having heart problems. I see some pain around the chest,
and there's a weight there." Now what can that mean? Again, it's multi-faceted. What's
the older gentleman? It could be my older brother, my father, my grandfather. It can
happen across that dimension, and it can also happen in time. What kind of heart problem
are we talking about? A death? Is it a diagnosis? Is it a prediction that's going to happen?
What is a heart problem? Does angina count? Does forgetting your heart medication on that
particular day coming back from the doctor with a diagnosis of high blood pressure—does that count?
Let's not forget about just the base rates—that is, just the probability of you having anyone
in your entire family with any sort of heart issue whatsoever is really likely. I mean,
just thinking of my own family, I could think about a dozen people in my family or extended
family that might count as part of that, right?
I think one of my favorite examples of this was in your conversation with the chiropractor
at the Mind Body Festival. In that conversation, he rattled off at least a dozen possible symptoms
that you might have as an indication that you might need some chiropractic treatment.
As your spine comes up, all of you tends to lean in that direction. Now if your spine
was lovely and straight, your head would be sitting over here. Obviously it's not. So
it would suggest that your spine comes up as a little bit of an S-shape and might trigger
another weak area here. It can present itself as either neck pain, shoulder pain, or headaches.
And of course the nerves in that part of the spine deal with cardiovascular function, so
low energy, trouble sleeping, snoring, shortness of breath, hay fever, asthma, allergies, blood
pressure issues, chest pains, angina, functional heart problems, dead. Those sorts of things
may be symptoms.
Got you. None of those. Not sure about death. Hopefully not that.
Yes. But just because they're weak areas doesn't always mean they present as symptoms.
Now he just rattled off a whole bunch of different symptoms, everything from trouble sleeping
to lower back pain to death, but I think most people, when listening to this set of symptoms
who are considering the possibility of chiropractic treatment, would be able to find something
in their own experience to cling on to. He cast a really wide net, and so I suspect that
he'd catch somebody within that net if it's cast wide enough.
I think if you combine these multiple endpoints with ambiguous statements, like we talked
about before, then that's nicely captured in the Japanese healing booth that we visited as well.
Now they made some really ambiguous statements about the effects of their treatment—for
example, improved well-being or increased happiness or strengthening the immune system.
What do these even look like if you were to test whether somebody's well-being was improved?
What would that actually look like? It's a really broad characterization.
Yes, and think about another dimension that's operating in time. We've got multiple windows
of time that are happening here, so if a prediction is made, when do you stop looking for hits?
If a healer says they've healed you or they've treated you, when should you stop looking?
When should you expect to feel better? When should you stop looking to feel better and
say, "Well, that healing mustn't have worked"?
Tom Gilovich has spoken about this previously. It's a common belief that things happen in
threes. Homicides, natural disasters, these things occur in triplets. But when do you
stop counting it as a triplet?
When you get to three.
Yes, exactly. So if you allow for enough variability in these windows of time, these predictions
can only be confirmed. It's very difficult to disconfirm it.
That's right. A nice example of this is quite a personal one, actually. I was talking to
my mom on the phone in preparing for this course and preparing for this segment in particular.
I'm telling her about going to the MindBodySpirit exhibition and so on, and talking to tarot
card readers. She said, "I went to a tarot card reader once about 30 years ago, I guess.
Thirty years." Yes, I was about nine or ten years old. She went to this tarot card reader,
and it kind of freaked her out actually a little bit because the reader said that she
would be in a large fire. She'd be okay, but the rest of her family might not be. So from
that point on, she actually lost sleep in thinking about this, in dwelling on what she
said during the reading. If you fast forward, she still remembers that reading 30 years
later. So you can imagine if there was a fire a decade later or something, she would probably
be very likely to attribute it as a success on behalf of that particular reader.
Yes, or if it was just a fire down the street or your next-door neighbor or a brush fire—all
of these things would probably count.
Exactly. There's enough variability in what counts as a fire, in the time that it takes.
It could be 30 years on, and you can still count it as a hit on that part.
So that really freaked her out. When she had this reading and there was the possibility
that her family was going to burn in the fire, that's kind of scary. When you're thinking
about whether to count the prediction as a success or not, there's a whole bunch of things
that can vary in terms of the nature of the fire. We actually, a few years later, had
our Christmas tree burned down due to my remote-controlled car. Does that count? Is that a fire? It could
be a brush fire. It could be a fire at our neighbor's place. That's close enough. Or
when? It's 30 years later, and she still thinks about that particular reading. And if there
was something 30 years on, she still might be able to make that link.
So I think these things, variable windows in time, multiple endpoints, I think are really important.
We've gone through a few of these general mechanisms that are operating in paranormal
phenomena or in predictions such as these. We've got a couple more to get through, but
let's ask people a few questions before we move on to make sure they really grasp what's going on here.