Instant Genius - Luck, the paranormal and the Moon landings - Everything you ever wanted to know about…. illusions, magic and the paranormal

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Our guest Prof Richard Wiseman is a spectacularly creative scientist who started off his career as a magician before becoming a psychologist. Over the last few decades, Richard has studied the art of deception, parapsychology and the concept of good luck alongside many other aspects of the human mind. Richard has a hugely popular YouTube channel called Quirkology, with a mere 2.15m subscribers and has written a book called Shoot For The Moon (£20, Quercus), which takes a closer look at the psychology that achieved the Moon landings. Over two quickfire, 30-minute episodes, Richard tells BBC Science Focus magazine editor Daniel Bennett how to make himself luckier, whether magicians make the best psychologists and why the stories we tell ourselves matter. And if you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, check out any of Richard’s books at richardwiseman.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @RichardWiseman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome back to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Dan Bennett, the editor of BBC Science Focus magazine. This is part two of everything you wanted to know about illusions, magic and the paranormal with Professor Richard Wiseman. If you miss part one, head back down and find out why scientists study magic and illusions, why we enjoy being deceived and what happens when we experience the impossible. In this episode, Richard and I discuss how you can make your own luck, what he found out when he studied one of the most haunted places in the UK, And what this all has to do with the moon landings? Okay, so you wrote a book all about luck and indeed studied it for many years.

So it would be remiss if I didn't ask you. Could I be born lucky? Or can I, which I think I am, by the way, my mum tells me I was born on the fourth, which is a very lucky day, apparently. And if I thought I was born unlucky, would I be able to make my own luck? The good questions, and not unrelated to magic, because lots of people have a very magical view of luck. So that work dates back quite a while now, and it came from me interviewing people about key moments in their lives, and they'd often say, oh, I'm a lucky person, or, you know,

my partner is extremely unlucky or whatever. At that point, no one had done any research into luck. They sort of dismissed it as kind of superstitious nonsense or just chance. And so I started to look at the psychology of it. We worked with about a thousand exceptionally lucky and unlucky people. And we could see that for the most part, not true of everyone all the time, but for the most part, people were making their own luck by the way they were thinking and behaving. And so to them, it did look like magic in their lives, that they would always get loads of opportunities or, you know, always fall on their

feet or whatever. But we could see that lucky people were creating those opportunities. They are very well connected with others. They are very resilient when bad things happen. They would bounce back. They're very optimistic. And so that optimism would become a self-fulfilling prophecy and the opposite with unlucky people. And then we did a series of experiments known as luck school where we got people to think and behave differently. And yes, you see changes to their self-perceived luck. So what you can do is change how lucky people feel, and that has a big impact on their lives. What it will have no impact on at all is them going to the casino or buying a lottery ticket. That's chance, and you can't be great if you could, but you can't get people to be more likely to win the lottery except by buying more tickets.

Even then the game's quite marginal. But you can get them to be luckier in life. And so that was my focus there. And so just to dig into that a little more. So you took people who felt like their whole life they had been unlucky, and you took your learnings from looking at these two groups of lucky and unlucky people, and you taught the unlucky ones how to, you know, make their own luck in the world. That's right.

And can you talk a little bit about how you, you know, what were the things you were teaching them? Well, I think, again, it comes down to assumptions. Once you start to see the world in a certain way, you assume that those assumptions, that worldview is somehow the truth. So a scenario that we'd give them would be something like, imagine, you're standing in a bank, in bursts of robber, they've got a gun, they fire a shot, and the bullet hits you in the armour. You're lucky or unlucky. Now, the unlucky people would just look astounded. And they just go, I've just been shot in the arm. Of course I'm unlucky.

Why? What is the point of this experiment? The lucky people would go, my goodness, another lucky day. You know, that bullet could have hit my head, could have hit my heart. If it's a big raid, then maybe the media are covering it, I'll sell my story, I'll make some money, and so on. So when you point out to the unlucky people, there's another way of looking at that. If instead of every event that happens to you, you think, well, it could have been better. which is what unlucky people do, that bullet could have missed me altogether.

If instead you generate counterfactuals, as they're known in psychology, counterfactuals, which are it could have been worse, you change your mindset. But until you point that out, it never occurs to people because they think, well, this is how the world is. I'm an unlucky person, and that's that. So it's kind of common sense, but like the old adage goes, common sense often isn't very common. And often you do have to point it out, then once people use that technology,

me, because generating those counterfactuals, they become more resilient. And therefore, people want to be around them. Now they're a little bit better connected. Now opportunities start to come their way. So change isn't difficult if it's the right type of change based on good scientific evidence. And this is something that struck me, actually, when I first read about some of your work in this area, particularly, you know, the example you just talked about with the bank robbery and how we are able to sort of frame our own experiences, I suppose.

It did make me one of the question, why, and I'm probably going to ask you this question again later as well, why, or should we be teaching this kind of stuff in school? So I'm quite passionate about this, and I've spoken about this many times. we absolutely should. So we teach kids, you know, maths and English, all these things. And of course we should be doing that. And then we let them out into the world with often very poor life skills. The sorts of things that psychologists know about, particularly in an area called positive psychology,

about how you become happy, how you retain that happiness, how you use optimism. I mean, right at the moment, you know, understanding how to remain optimistic is really, really important. And people think, oh, it's just positive thinking. You know, just cheer up. Just expect tomorrow to be better. And you think none of that is true. You know, you need to have global hope at the moment. But if tomorrow is going to be another rough day, you don't want to be thinking it's going to be a better day and that's a disappointment. And then the day after, that's a disappointment and so on. And so there's a huge difference between what's called global optimism and day-to-day optimism. People need to know this stuff. It's really important.

and for some reason we leave it to the self-help books for the most part tell us a lot of that stuff isn't scientific it's just some practitioner going oh this seems to work or try that and it seems to a crazy state of affairs to me so i i would love to see psychology that type of practical psychology taught in schools yeah and certainly as you said in the state we find ourselves in now it could be you know quite powerful giving people the tools to kind of at least understand their own thoughts and their own mind to a better detail. That's right. And understanding about anxiety and how you deal with that. And also how you... So the one thing that I think we are astonishing at, and this gets back to some of our earlier discussions, is change.

We are phenomenal adapting to change. And so that's why I hope about the current situation. I think the world that emerges may well be very... different. But I hope that it will be possibly a better world. We are very, very good at changing. We have very, very plastic brains in that sense. We learn. And that should give us enormous hope for the future. And again, it's something we should tell kids, I hate this idea of you're this type of person or that type of person, or that you're good at maths or you're not good at maths. You know, it's crazy. all this stuff that's around growth mindset at the moment is wonderful.

Just telling kids you change. You might not like maths at the moment, but maybe you will in a couple of years' time. We change, we learn. That's what makes life interesting. Yeah, you're right. I hadn't thought of it in that kind of window of we do seem to have a habit of setting kids in stone at a very young point in their life.

Absolutely. And it gets back to magic. It's about putting people in boxes and putting ourselves in boxes. and putting ourselves in boxes. And what magicians do is they come along and go, you know all those assumptions. They're just assumptions. They're not true.

And that you have great potential. So I think that's, those are the sorts of messages I like to hear. Okay. So I'm going to go back just a little to something you just mentioned, just to clarify, because I think luck did seem quite popular on Google.

I wonder why. And that's, and that's you touch on it. So I can't, I can't, you know, take the teachings from your, you know, from your research and go out into casino. I can't, I can't make my odds any better. Well, you can definitely, you can definitely try and let me know how it goes. But they're quite, they're nice buildings. Normally they're quite plush buildings. Are they?

Well, they're not, you know, if you go to Vegas, you know, they're very nice and some of them. and they're not built on what they're earning from the winners. Put it like that. So, yeah, if you go to casino, then, yeah, the odds are obviously against you. That's how the whole system works. And no matter how optimistic and positive you are, it won't make any difference at all. In fact, it may be against you because you get this gambler's fallacy where you lose the money and think, well, then I'm going to win, you know, big next time and so on.

So, no, I think avoiding those and focusing on luck in life is probably a better way forward. Okay. So I'm going to move on to another area of study that you, you know, spent a fair amount of time in, especially there where you were in Edinburgh. You study seances. Now, you know, again, you might ask, why are you studying seances as a scientist? What's that all about? Perfect reasonable question. So, yeah, so I studied paranormal. actually for a long time, so the Kursler Chair of Parasicology at Edinburgh University. And I was always very skeptical about it. Most magicians are quite skeptical about such matters.

But I was interested in how psychics and mediums persuade us. They're in touch with the dead or whatever. And that's a whole different type of deception. It's all quite fascinating. But then I read about Victorian dark room seances, where in Victorian times, before television, when it was all a lot more interesting in the evenings, they would make the room very dark, they'd have luminous dots on objects, you'd place those in the middle of the table, they'd hold hands, often there'd be a medium present, and these objects would fly around the room.

And there is a whole genre in magic about how to do those tricks. So I looked up all that stuff, and I looked at it and thought, really? I mean, really? That's going to fall anyone, because the techniques are very simple, and I just didn't believe it. So I thought, let's stage my own experimental seances, because if it fools us nowadays, it probably would have fooled us in Victorian times. So we used traditional techniques to fall modern day audiences, and people walked out not having any clue how we did it.

So these techniques absolutely work in the emotionally charged atmosphere of the Seance Room, the darkness helps as well. Often people want to believe that the spirit world still exists, and that helps you as a performer. So it was kind of fascinating. I was interested in the psychology of the seance room. And so, and what did you learn about the psychology of the science room? What were the, probably the levers that people were pushing to convince, convince the people in the room that there was a ghost? Well, first of all, it's actually in the totally dark room, you've got no context. So you've got a luminous object. So you've got a luminous object.

And it's very hard to tell whether it's moving because you've got, you can't tell, you can't see the table, you can't see the surroundings. So if your eyes move a little bit or your head moves, often it looks like the object is moving. And the Victorian fake mediums knew about that. And that coupled with some verbal suggestion means that you can get some quite big effects. So we would suggest objects were moving, everyone should focus on them, and then lo and behold, about about 40% of people would report movements after the same. but we've done nothing at all other than suggested it. So suggestion really matters and belief matters. So when you go to see a magician, you know you're going to be fooled.

You don't sort of have an open mind in that sense. And so the tricks have to be pretty good. When you go and see a medium or a psychic, you want it to be true. And so you kind of cut them quite a lot of slack. And so the tricks are nowhere near as good, but they have a bigger impact because you're just not looking for a trick. you know, in the same way as, you know, you don't go to your doctor and kind of go, what's the symptoms? You go, well, you know, you tell me, I'm going to sit here and not tell you anything.

You know, the two you work together to create a diagnosis. And that's very similar to go into a psychic. You want it to be true. The two of you work together. And in some ways of the psychic, the sitter, the person going, does more of the work than the psychic. In a sense, they should be charging the psychic for the session. And so you're up there in a very, haunted part of the country, you know, can you give me a definitive answer to whether ghosts exist

then? I think I can, and I don't think they do. So, I know, I know, I'm so sorry. So I've worked in many haunted, allegedly haunted places. I'm tapered for the unexpected answer, then. Turns out. It's great, wouldn't it? So, yeah, so I worked in Hampton Court's, Pallet. which is allegedly haunted, which is great with the first Ghostbusters, as it were, to be called into a royal palace. Fantastic. That's a good way to get free rent. Yes.

We stayed there for 10 days. It was amazing. And they have a part of the palace called the Haunted Gallery, which the first clue is in the title. And people have had lots of weird experiences there. So we did some experiments there. And then with the underground vaults in Edinburgh, which allegedly haunted with the experiments there. And what we saw in each case was that actually there is something to the claim that people do have weird experiences in these places, even if they don't know the reputation of them. My guess is that those are environmentally driven.

So one hypothesis is about ultrasound, very low frequency sound waves, which cars can produce and air conditioning systems can produce. And they kind of make you feel very uneasy, but you can't hear them. And it's possible that haunted locations have a large amount of that. So we looked at that and did experiments into that. So, yeah, unfortunately, I'm not a big believer in ghosts. I'm sorry. Hi, sorry, I'm just going to interrupt for just a second to tell you about a new subscription offer

we've got going for BBC Science Focus magazine. At six issues for 99, it's great value. And it comes straight to your door, which is ideal in these strange times. Don't miss out because we've got some great issues coming up. We're soon going to be digging into the science of dogs and we're going to be finding out whether life could have started around black holes and we've even got a behind-the-scenes feature coming up

about the UK's next moon mission. To get the offer, head to www.bysubscriptions.com forward slash science, focus, spring podcast offer. Anyway, back to the show. And you've also, in the sort of the last bit of your paranormal experience of the space, You've looked into ESP, extra sensory perception. That's, yes, yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah.

Sorry, just a sudden, what does ESP stuff? My memory. I'm sending it to you now. Oh, I got it. I got it. Magic. Now I remember. So, you've studied that.

And interestingly, it's got an interesting history, I suppose, because I suppose of most paranormal things. There was a fair bit of scientific weight behind it, I suppose. There was a general consensus for a while that there might be something to it. What did you find in your... It is a really interesting literature and a much better literature than most sceptics would think. So it goes back all the way to Victorian scientists doing these studies.

I was always very sceptical of it, and I thought it was due to I mean, you say, extracentary perception. The other joke is error someplace is the gag that some people use. I thought it's down to errors. And so I did some research into that, then drifted away from it. And then a psychologist and parapsychologist called Darrell Ben did some research where participants in his study seemed to be able to see into the future. So I tried to replicate those studies and couldn't replicate them. And then we couldn't publish those null replications.

because journals like to carry positive findings. So we struggle to replicate them, but eventually, sorry, struggle to publish, but eventually we did. And then because of Daryl's kind of high-profile studies, other psychologists started to look at his methods and criticise them and go, hold on a second, you're sort of doing lots of analyses there, and you've got lots of hypotheses you're not telling us about, and so on and so forth.

I think some of those criticisms are true. And then other psychologists went hold on a second that may be true of parapsychology, but it's also true of psychology. And in psychology, it's very difficult to publish replications that didn't work out. So it's all right us criticizing parapsychology, but what about psychology? And that's led to what's now known as the replication crisis. That lots of psychological findings don't replicate, and lots of these errors that parapsychologists are making, psychologists are making too. So weirdly, parapsychology has changed certainly to face of psychology and possibly science, but in ways it didn't anticipate, not because it's found a new psychic force,

but because methodologically it exposed flaws that were present in lots of psychology experiments. I didn't realize that was where the replication crisis had sort of part of it had begun. Absolutely, yeah. And so now that's led to what's called registered reports, which is scientists and psychologists in particular, have to register their experiment beforehand and what analyses they're going to carry out in order to prevent some of these errors. Now, parapsychologists have been doing that a very long time because they realized that

was a problem very early on. But it's only really in the last couple of years that's coming to psychology. So this fringe area has had a massive impact on the mainstream. Okay. So I want to move on now to something you've talked about before, which is sort of your latest focus of interest with the big, obviously, anniversary of the Apollo moon landings having just passed. What, you know, I think you've hinted at it, but, you know, there is a link. I didn't see it actually until, you know, we started talking that the link between the moon landings

and Apollo and your other sort of fields of study. Can you talk to me about the relationship there between those two. I actually hadn't realized that link either. So most reason I've been writing self-development-e evidence-based, but still self-development stuff. And so I was talking to a friend of mine, Helen Keane, who's a comedian, but also a sort of huge Apollo and space fan. And this was a few years ago. And we're talking about all the technology that's come from the moon landings. And I said, and it's just a comment off the top of my head, I said, well, what about the mental technology, the mindset that got us onto the moon? And she said, oh, I don't think. anyone's really done very much on that.

But you should contact Craig, who's a friend of her, as another sort of space fan, because over the years, and he lives in Wales, over the years, he's befriended the Apollo mission controllers, the people who sat at the heart of the moon landings. So I contacted Craig, he put me in touch with all the mission controllers. And they hadn't really been interviewed about the mindset. And as I started to conduct those interviews, I realized this very strong linkage with magic and with the paranormal in that sense.

In that boy, was it an impossible dream? It was ridiculous in 62 to think you're going to put a person on the moon when you've only got a rocket that's going a few inches off the ground at best. And so I looked at the Kennedy archives, and it's astonishing. You know, his scientists are saying to him, well, we could perhaps put a satellite up and he's going, think bigger. We might better put a space station up. Think bigger. Might better get a rocket to the moon. Think bigger. We might be to get a person on the moon and back again. And then he says, by the end of the decade. And so what do you do when you're confronted with the impossible? And that's what the book is about. It's about the Apollo mindset. And part of it is they brought in, as I said before, people who were so young, they didn't know that it couldn't be done.

They never told them how hard it was. And they selected on passion. So those were often, the mission controllers, from rural America, first in their families, to go to college. But boy, were they passionate. I spoke to the recruitment officer. He said, if they came in with fire in their eyes, and he said, I made the office quite hard to find, so that anyone who found it really wanted to be there, he says, they're firing their eyes, they started. And if I couldn't sense that fire, they didn't. And it's an astonishing story of how in about seven years you accomplish the impossible. That's really interesting because it's something that, I suppose it's quite, you know, fire in their eyes is something that I imagine we could all recognize, but would be pretty hard to put into a, you know, a psychological test of the sort that you, you know, that you typically find in these really, you know, when companies like Cisco or IBM recruit and they have these psychometric tests, that's the word I was. Yeah.

Is that true? I think there's been a movement away from some of that sort of testing, where we, that notion of skills-based testing. And I think now there's that notion of kind of character that when I spoke to the mission controllers, it was so odd. I trusted them. I absolutely trusted them within seconds of speaking. It's a very strange thing to try and explain.

But you just go, if you, if my life was on the line, I'd want you. looking after me. I trust you. And I think that was there. They had a huge integrity and passion. And often because they're from a farming background, they were used to working in a team. So they weren't egotists. They used the we word throughout the interview. They never use I. We did this. Oh, you should speak to so and so. They did an amazing job. It was never about them. It was always about the team. And they were used to problem solving. with what they had. It's sort of fantastic in terms of agility and innovation.

So I think all those things, it sort of saddens me. I think social media is making us very eye-centered. We want to tell the world how wonderful we are. We get very down because we look at other people on social media, and they seem to be even more wonderful than we are, even though we know we're lying on social media, and I assume they are as well. So I think we've lost the weeness that a lot of people say,

I want to be a celebrity, instead of I want to do something which is meaningful, which will last past my lifetime that will be a legacy. It isn't about me. It's doing something meaningful and kind for others. And the mission controllers had that mindset massively. And suppose this is probably, you know, my penultimate question, and it seems clear now, but I'll ask it anyway. Would you say that the impossible is something that's sort of threaded through your work?

Absolutely. I mean, in different ways. So magicians fabricate it. I think the paranormalists claim it's true and it isn't. And the Apollo folks do it for real. But what you have underlying that is still that notion of openness each time to something which should not be true but turns out or appears to. be. And as humans, you think, isn't that phenomenal in our heads we can simulate and model an event which is completely outside of our understanding? And I think the upside of that is occasionally

that impossible event turns out to be possible. And it's those very special moments that push forward technology or whatever it is medicine or science. When somebody comes along and goes, I know everyone is telling me this is impossible, actually I think I can do it and here's the evidence and we all go, oh my goodness, and then we all follow along that way. So yeah, I think it is a theme that sat below there. If you've enjoyed this episode and on new series, please do subscribe. And if you can spare a minute, leave a review. It lets us know you're enjoying the format, and you can even let us know what topic you want

us to tackle next. Of course, for more guides to the big ideas in science and technology, head over to our website sciencefocus.com. Or better yet, sign up to our brilliant newsletter at sciencefocus.com forward slash newsletter. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The text and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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