Something You Should Know - The Real Reason for Anxiety & The Science of the Paranormal

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

You’ve probably heard this old rock & roll legend… that when Van Halen performed in concert, they used to ask for M&Ms in their dressing room but all the brown ones had to be removed. Why in the world would they want that? Listen as I reveal the amazingly practical reason. https://www.safetydimensions.com.au/van-halen/ A lot of people suffer from too much anxiety. But anxiety is not the problem according to Dr. John Delony. Rather than focus on reducing your anxiety, John’s advice has more to do with handling whatever it is that is causing the anxiety in the first place. Much like when a smoke alarm goes off in your house, do you just try to figure out how to turn off the alarm or do you try to put out the fire? Listen and you will get a very different approach to dealing with anxiety in your life. Dr. John Delony is a mental health and wellness expert who hosts The John Delony Show podcast (https://www.ramseysolutions.com/shows/the-dr-john-delony-show) and he is author of the book Building a Non-Anxious Life. (https://amzn.to/4aabU1G). Do you believe in the paranormal? Many people not only believe but insist they have had actual experiences with ghosts, or psychic ability or telepathic powers – even alien encounters. While the proof for all of this is sketchy, many very intelligent people swear by their beliefs. Why? The "why" is what's so fascinating according to Chris French, Emeritus Professor and Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London and author of the book, The Science of Weird Sh**: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal (https://amzn.to/3PdKnVd). Could the believers be on to something? Listen as we explore this. Do you hate to get out of bed in the morning? Is it just hard to pull off the covers and actually get up? There are some things you can do to make that experience a little less dreadful. Listen as I explain. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tricks-waking-up-sleep_n_2718257#slide=2125100 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING We love the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast! https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/business-podcasts/think-fast-talk-smart-podcast Go to https://uscellular.com/TryUS and download the USCellular TryUS app to get 30 days of FREE service! Keep you current phone, carrier & number while testing a new network! NerdWallet lets you compare top travel credit cards side-by-side to maximize your spending! Compare & find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, & more https://NerdWallet.com TurboTax Experts make all your moves count — filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund, guaranteed! See guarantee details at https://TurboTax.com/Guarantees Dell TechFest starts now! To thank you for 40 unforgettable years, Dell Technologies is celebrating with anniversary savings on their most popular tech. Shop at https://Dell.com/deals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, the real reason Van Halen demanded no brown M&Ms in their dressing room. Then, anxiety. People today get more anxious than ever before. I think it's important to ask yourself the one scary question. Is what you're doing working? Has being anxious ever solved the problem? Has leaving a party and spending the next two hours worrying about what you said at the party,

has that ever helped in taking back anything you said? Also, some help if you dread getting out of bed in the morning. And the paranormal, ghosts, psychics, even aliens. Also, some help if you dread getting out of bed in the morning. And the paranormal, ghosts, psychics, even aliens. Some people believe in them and some people don't. The question still remains, okay, if the paranormal forces don't exist, then the challenge is, why do so many people think they do? Why do so many people think they have directly experienced the paranormal?

And that, from a psychologist's point of view, is an interesting challenge. All this today on Something You Should Know. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know.

You know, every week we publish three episodes, three separate episodes on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday morning. And so the best way to make sure you don't miss any episode is to follow this podcast on whatever app you listen to, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or CastBox, or wherever you listen. If you follow it, the episodes are delivered to you as soon as they're published, and you won't miss a one. We start today with, and I've always liked this story, it's about the rock group Van Halen.

Back in the 80s, when Van Halen was performing in concert, their contract required the promoter to provide M&Ms in their dressing room, but all the brown ones, all the brown M&Ms had to be removed. When it became public, people theorized everything from out-of-control demands, egomaniacal rock stars, maybe one of the band members had an allergy to brown M&Ms. None of that was true. It was to keep the band safe from harm. According to the band's David Lee Roth, when performing, Van Halen required very complex trapeze-like riggings and trap doors on stage. If not constructed properly, it could be very dangerous to the band members.

So, the group's tour manager put an M&M clause in the contract as a spot check to see how the staff at each venue focused on the details. So, before his safety walkthrough, the tour manager would go to the dressing room and if he saw even one brown M&M in the bowl, he would ask the venue manager to redo and or double-check the stage setup. Because if they couldn't get something simple like M&M's right,

what else could they screw up? And that is something you should know. Anxiety is a hot topic right now. People are anxious. Kids are anxious. The whole world is anxious about so many things that might happen. And not in a good way. I mean, we don't usually worry about great things happening. We worry about the disaster

around the corner. Why is there so much anxiety? How can we be less anxious? Well, the person to discuss that is John Deloney. He is a mental health and wellness expert and host of his own podcast called The John Deloney Show, and he's author of a book called Building a Non-Anxious Life. Hi, John. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Excellent. So first, tell me what anxiety is exactly. I think in the simplest terms, anxiety is just an alarm system. And outside of the bell curve medical issues, it's really all it is.

And we've got a culture that tells us if you feel bad or if you feel uncomfortable, then that in and of itself is a problem and should be fixed. Everybody should be comfortable all the time. And so when our bodies feel anxious, when it sounds those alarms, we immediately try to fix the anxiety or stop the anxiety. And really, that's like taking a magic marker and coloring over your gas gauge on your dashboard. Like, I don't want to see that light. Like,

okay, but your car is going to run out of gas. Right? So I think we, um, have over pathologized to sound like a nerd. I think we've over, we've made anxiety the enemy, and it's really not.

We've created a very, very anxious life for ourselves. And so I think the question we should all be asking is not why is everybody so anxious and how do we stop? I think the question is, what if our bodies are right? What if the anxiety is right? What kind of world have we built, and what do we need to do now? Well, don't you find that a lot of people who get anxious about stuff,

that there's this sense that by being anxious about something that's going to happen or might happen or you imagine might happen, that that's somehow working on the problem that that that that anxiety is somehow even though you know really that that doesn't help the problem that that's your way of preparing for it not to parse it out i think we ruminate i think we we spin up and spend a lot of energy on a particular problem that we have no way to solve. And by doing that, then our bodies sound the alarms. And so I don't know that anybody chooses anxiousness as though it's helping. But I do.

I personally will spend a ton of time having imaginary conversations with world leaders. If I just had 20 minutes with so and so i would tell my body doesn't know the difference it's off to the races it's as though we're having that conversation and it's getting very heated and so then it sounds the alarms it raises my heart rate it dumps cortisol and adrenaline to my body it goes to fight or flight it's go time baby um that's the that's the anxiety alarms and so yeah when you start ruminating when you start worrying about these huge issues or when you create a light like i'm just gonna start buying stuff i'm gonna start buying stuff i'm gonna start buying stuff i'm gonna have another drink another drink i'm gonna text this person i'm not married to

because she makes me feel alive all of those behaviors then sound the alarms, right? But if anxious is what you do, then how do you do something different? And what do you do different? I think it's important to live in reality and ask yourself the one scary question. Is what you're doing working? Has this ever worked? Has being anxious ever solved a problem? Has leaving a party and spending the next two hours worrying about what you said at the party, has that ever helped in taking back anything you said? Has it ever helped you the following week when you see those people again? No, it doesn't solve the problem. think owning the life I'm leading is setting these alarms off or in a more straightforward analogy, the alarm in my kitchen is not the problem. The fire is the problem. And so I'm going to begin

to look not to shut off the alarms, but begin looking for the things in my life that are setting the alarms off in the first place. If you're in your kitchen and you climb up and take the batteries out of the smoke detector, your house is going to still burn down. You're just not going to hear the alarm system. You haven't solved the problem, right? Okay, but what is it you do instead? A, you decide, or number one, you decide, I'm going to stop going to war with my body. I am not the enemy of me.

I'm going to start assuming my body's right when it gets my attention and then I'm going to begin working through a series of daily choices not to deal with the anxiety but to deal with the life part to make a life that my body isn't

constantly feeling unsafe in and that can be as simple as choosing connection like Like I'm going to choose to not do my life by myself. It's going to be awkward and weird and uncomfortable, but I have to have people in my life. Or if my body knows I'm alone, it's going to sound the alarms. Okay. I can do that. I may need to go see a counselor for some historical stuff that I need to deal with, or I'm going to go see a doctor and finally deal with that weight because my body's been sounding the alarms that we're not safe, we're not safe, we're not safe. Those are some of the easy ones. Some of the harder ones are,

I'm going to choose freedom. I am going to choose to not let a bank or a mortgage company tell me what I'm going to do. And that means I'm going to start on a 10. It took me and my wife 15 years to pay off our student loans, to pay off our car notes, to pay off the credit cards, and to get into a place where Visa does not tell our family what we do every day. I do. My wife does. And if your body knows that, hey, man, if you get fired, they're going to take your house. They're going to take your food. They're going to take your house. They're going to take your food. They're going to take your cars. If your body knows that, it would be failing you if it wasn't anxious because you're not safe.

And so I'm going to begin working through, I'm going to get rid of clutter in my house. I'm going to clear my calendar and stop letting my nine-year-old soccer coach tell our family what we're going to do for the next 14 years with the Saturdays and Sundays because they're not're not going to run my life i'm going to choose to be free i'm going to choose reality i'm going to choose to have hard conversations with my wife with my kids with my neighborhood with my school my kids school i am going to live in the present and not be distracted all the time i'm going to choose to believe in something bigger than myself because my body can't hold up everything. It never was designed to. And so I'm going to start working on these parts of my life.

I'm going to make these choices on a regular basis. I'm going to choose exercise. I'm going to choose to stop mainlining candy, which is one of my great challenges. I'm going to choose to deal with my alcohol. I'm going to choose to deal with my marriage. I'm going to do these things so that my body isn't constantly going, hey, we're not safe. We're not safe. We're not safe. And in so doing, I'm going to give myself peace so that when your cousin dies, when your mom gets

cancer, when the economy collapses, you can head right into those issues you can you can go be sad you can go mourn your job and it's going to be annoying and heartbreaking not catastrophic so that's what i'm going to solve for and so i think sometimes when people start to think the way you just described which sounds sounds great, as soon as there's a setback, as soon as they fail, it's anxiety time again, because now they're anxious because they can't do it. They failed. The worst part about the last 25 years of work for me, sitting with people who have lost everything, they've lost a a child they've lost their home they've lost everything is watching them on the back end come back and our culture talks a lot about post-traumatic stress but does a very poor job of talking about

the other side of that teeter-totter which is post-traumatic growth people who go through hell and continue to chase that tiny little pin light that turns into a candle light that turns into a spotlight that turns into the sun they keep walking forward and they gather people and they gather resources and they change their behavior and they change their family tree so instead of saying when i feel anxiousness it's just it's my body telling me once again you failed that's not your body that's culture your body's just saying we're not safe you can you can smile and go you're right i got knocked down again oh man this sucks i'm

gonna get back up and i'm gonna get back up and on those days i can't get back up i've got a couple of people in my corner that can reach down and pull me up and it's about getting back up and about getting back up but anxiety will never tell you that it's over. Don't you find that there are people, though, who just, anxiety is their fuel, and it always has been. That that's kind of, that if you were to take that away from them, if they were to change their life so there was no anxiety, like they almost wouldn't know what to do because that's always been their fuel. Yeah, man, you nailed it. It's not only a fuel, it's an identity. I can't go to that party because I have social anxiety as though it's like a cancer.

It's something that is upon you like a blanket or a jacket. I have this. I can't. I just do. I've got five toes and i have anxiety um instead of looking at it through a lens of and other people sounds my body's alarms hey i wonder why that is oh maybe it's because of some childhood abuse or maybe it's because i got made fun of as a kid or i got left out as a kid who knows why but for some reason my body's identified groups of people as unsafe. So when I head in, I'm going to put my hand in my chest and say, I know you feel unsafe, but I'm good here. I'm good here. Or maybe I need to not tell that joke because it's not that funny.

But yes, countless, millions of people have taken anxiety as an identity. It's a way to operate through the world. And yes, when you go deal with it, I remember my therapist asked me an amazing question. She said, how are you feeling? This is after we've done some really intense work over a long period of time. And I said, I don't know how to describe what I'm feeling. The only word that keeps coming to mind is depressed, but I'm not depressed. Things are great. I feel fine. I just feel low. And she smiled really big. And she said, this, John, is what normal feels like. And I had just been spun up for so long.

It became, quote unquote, who I was. I was the energy guy. I was the always the, oh yeah, but it could all come down and end the, oh yeah, what about this? I was always that guy. And so what I've had to do is practice not being that guy because that guy has heart attacks and strokes and dies young and eventually burns out all the people around him. I don't want to be that guy. We're talking about anxiety and my guest is John Deloney. He is author of a book called Building a Non-Anxious Life. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks,

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Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. So, John, would you agree that maybe part of the problem so many people are dealing with anxiety-related issues

is because kids aren't really taught to handle anxiety when they're kids. They're protected from it. Without meaning to, when my son got a hit in Little League, I cheered really loud. And when he struck out, I just didn't say anything. I don't want to be like, oh, we hit the ball in our field. I'm just going to be cool. I also don't want to be one of those dads who, when their kid strikes out, they're like, that's all right. Because get, because it's not all right. You struck out. It stinks. Without realizing it over time, I was teaching my son's nervous system the way to dad's heart. You will score this run. You will get this grade. You will cross this finish line. Anxiety is, if you don't get this, we're done. You're a loser. Dad doesn't call. Mom,

he gets embarrassed, right? Those are things that a body can't handle. So my son went to take some tests. We're going to move some schools and he had to go take some tests on Saturday the other day. And I literally held his face and he's like, Dad, he's almost 14. He's like, Dad. And he's humongous to her eye to eye. And I said, listen, these tests are really important. And if you fail them, you're probably not going to this school. And I laughed like that.

And I said, and there's not a test you can take where I won't hug you when you walk out the door period do i love you yes sir am i going to love you regardless of the scores yes sir do i believe in you yes sir am i going to laugh at you if you fail this and he cracked up and he goes yes sir right but it was me just reiterating this is huge and it's got big implications. It's got big real world implications. And you ain't going to lose me over it. And so now he can focus just on the task part of it. Does that make sense? Does that ring true with you?

Yeah, I think so. I get it. And I understand your advice about dealing with the things in life that cause the anxiety rather than dealing with the things in life that cause the anxiety rather than dealing with the anxiety. But you can't deal with everything that causes anxiety because things happen. Things come up in life that you can't plan for. Things happen. Always.

Always. Yeah, but it always happens. And if you're not ready for it, we just got hit with, oh, you need a new roof. Oh, man. You know how expensive a new roof is? Oh, I just got one. I just got one. I grew up in a home where money was, my dad was a policeman.

And there were some harrowing years financially. Three kids. And we didn't have a lot. We shared a family car. He had a police cruiser. And we all wore hand-me-down lot. We shared a family car. He had a police cruiser and we all wore hand-me-downs. It was tough sledding. I remember when I was married in the first five or 10 years of my life, when I'd racked up so much freaking student loan debt and house debt and all that,

walking around the house at night with my hands in my hair, my wife was dead asleep. She didn't know how bad it was financially. The roof repair is coming. I can prepare for it so it's annoying or I can not prepare for it and it costs me everything. But yeah, life's always going to be throwing punches, man. That's the state of things. Here's the example I wrote about in the book. It was out of nowhere, my cousin died. He's about 10 years older than me. And man, it was devastating for the whole family. It was out of nowhere. Because 15 years ago, my wife and I put a stake in the ground and said no more. We had money to go to the funeral and to get really sad and to grieve without other worries. And that's the gift we're looking for here. Not that people aren't going to pass away. The thing is, is that when life comes, can you exhale and go, here we go?

Because you're good to go. It sounds though, like as wonderful as it is to be where you are, that getting there is a monumental task. And where would you even suggest I begin? marriage? What is the state of your relationship with your kids? Since kids absorb tension in the home and in their environments, what is our environment saying to our kids? How are our kids doing? What's the state of our finances? Who do we owe money to? This is write them all down on a piece of paper, all of them. What's the state of my relationship with my mom and my dad in their elderly years? It's choosing reality. And for some of us, like me, it was I owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'd created a world that I guaranteed that my family was going to be in a mess. Guaranteed it.

For some people, it's putting their face in their hands and realizing your marriage has been over for a long time. Some of it is, I've got to be honest with my kids. I've got to be honest about my job is killing me. And others is, man, we're actually doing really, really well right now. Let's start having people over. And so I think for everybody, starting with choosing reality, what is the state of things for you is a great place to start. What do you recommend for someone who is prone to anxiety and something unexpected happens and you go into your anxiety mode? What do you recommend people do?

One of the things that I was trained for when i was doing crisis response stuff is whenever ever possible walk from your place of notification to the actual place where there's a scenario going on meaning if i'm in my dean of students office and somebody comes sprinting into the room and goes i need you now somebody's about to kill themselves which happened more than once if i get up and go oh my gosh and i flip my desk over and sprint out of the room running as fast as i can down the hall my tie flying behind me right i bring a whole world of my chaos to an already chaotic situation but if I can walk or at very least sort of trot down there and I exhale upon entering the room the worst-case outcome here is that they're no longer with us

and we're gonna have to sit in that. It's going to be a tragedy. But most of us believe that if this thing happens, all of our life is over. It's not. It's not. And you can only experience that after you've sat in those rooms time and time again. And so the greatest gift I can give, I'm going to bring peace to this situation. And if it happens, most of us are still

going to be here and the sun's going to come up. And is it going to be hard and awful? And we have to grieve no doubt about it, but the sun's going to come up. And it's hard to see that on this side of a tragedy or this side of a thing that we're worrying about. If I turn in this report and the boss hates it, I'm going to get fired. And your body responds as though the end of time is now, but it's not going to be. You're going to get fired. Things might get tough. You might have to move back home. You might have to have a really hard conversation with your wife or your kids or your husband. And then we're going to go get another job and it's going to be different. Our life's going to look different, but we're going

to head that way. Right? So a lot of the worry is this buildup that we're about to fall off a cliff, and very, very rarely does that cliff actually exist. Well, I like your analogy that you used in the beginning that when people who are anxious have problems, the anxiety isn't the problem. It's the alarm system. It's the fire alarm. But the problem is the fire and

that we need to look at the fire and not so much the alarm. Let's just look at the data, man. More people than ever before in human history are under the care of a mental health professional right now. Right now. More people are taking psychotropic medications drugs for anxiety depression ocd adhd than ever before in human history and the numbers are going through the roof when they discovered penicillin in short order deaths from infection fell off a map it solved that problem for the time being and so we have to be honest me as a mental health guy this is my world these are my gang i have to look and say what if what we're doing is not working what what what now and maybe it's these people were never quote-unquote broken or pathological

or malfunctioning to begin with. Maybe their bodies are working perfectly. And the real question we have to ask is what kind of world have we created that the human body can't live in? That to me seems like a much more instructive question than continually telling people, well, you're broken. Well, something wrong with you. I'll fix it. I'll fix it. I'll fix it. Just give me $175 plus $50 copay. Just keep taking this pill the rest of your life and we'll manage it. And we'll keep having to increase the dosage. At some point we have to say, whoa, this isn't solving the issue. We need to take a 30,000 foot view of this thing. And that to me is a scarier question. It's a harder question. And man, it's a way more

empowering question. Well, you certainly have a different take on anxiety and what to do about it that I think everybody needs to hear. I've been speaking with John Deloney. He is a mental health and wellness expert. He's the host of his own podcast called The John Deloney Show, and he's author of a book called Building a Non-Anxious Life. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, John. Thanks for coming on and talking about this. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at bestbuy.ca.

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You know what's weird? I think most people believe, at least intellectually, they understand that there is no such thing as ghosts, haunted houses, ESP, paranormal events. After all, many of these things have been investigated, they're often debunked, and investigated, they're often debunked, and even if they're not debunked, they never seem to find much in the way of evidence to support the fact that there's something paranormal going on. Still, I suspect most of us have

had some experience, or we know someone who's had some experience, or maybe it's that we want to believe, but something is going on that keeps people talking about paranormal things. It never gets put to bed as baloney. Why is that? Why, in the face of very little evidence, do people imagine that maybe, possibly, in some cases, perhaps there might be something to this thing about ghosts and paranormal psychic things. Why? Well, that's kind of interesting and something we're about to discuss with Chris French. Chris is Emeritus Professor and Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths University of London.

He's author of a book called The Science of Weird. We don't say that word on our podcast, but it's the commonly known S word, The Science of Weird, Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal. Hey, Chris, welcome to Something You Should Know. Nice to be here. So first, if you would, explain what it is you research, this idea of why people believe in paranormal things. Essentially, we're going to be talking about anomalistic psychology, and that always immediately prompts the question, what the heck is anomalistic psychology. The main focus of anomalistic psychology is upon trying to come up with non-paranormal explanations for ostensibly paranormal experiences and beliefs. So that can be anything from people who claim they've been abducted by aliens to people who think they've

got psychic powers, ghosts, you name it, all that kind of stuff. If it's weird, we're interested in it. We want to know if we can come up with alternative non-paranormal explanations and wherever possible, can we actually put our explanations to the test and produce evidence to see if they hold water? And why is this important to study? Yeah, for a long time, I kind of got that kind of attitude of why are you interested in this stuff? You know, we all know that ghosts don't exist.

We know that people aren't being abducted by aliens and so on. And the answer to that, from my point of view, is firstly, although I would tend to agree, I don't think it's kind of a properly open minded scientific attitude to say we know that ghosts don't exist. We know that people aren't being abducted by aliens. It just some of these claims just might be true. And so from a scientific point of view, I think that's important because if any of them are, then it means that conventional science is either wrong or incomplete in important ways. But also as a psychologist, we know that most people

will endorse at least one paranormal claim. And a sizable minority of the population claim they have directly experienced the paranormal. So either at least some paranormal claims are genuine, or this is telling us something really interesting about the human mind. So either way, we can only win by taking these kind of claims seriously and trying to get to the bottom of them. But doesn't it seem that oftentimes when they're investigated and people try to get to the bottom of them, there's either fraud or there's just no evidence.

There's no reason to believe that the paranormal had anything to do with it. I think there's a lot of skeptics who kind of say, oh, there's no evidence to support paranormal claims. There's no evidence that ESP exists. There's no evidence for this, that, and the other. And that's just not true. There is evidence. There is evidence that a lot of skeptics just kind of choose to ignore. The interesting questions come when you ask, well, what about the quality of the evidence and the interpretation of the evidence? And as I say, I am a sceptic. I do not believe, if I had to bet my house on it, I would bet that paranormal forces do not exist. But I'm always prepared to say I might be wrong. There might be new evidence that comes along in the future that makes me

change my mind. And so even though I don't think there's very much chance of that, I kind of acknowledge it as a theoretical possibility. The question still remains, okay, if the paranormal forces don't exist, then the challenge is, why do so many people think they do? Why do so many people think they have directly experienced the paranormal? And that, from a psychologist's point of view, is an interesting challenge. So when you talk about paranormal things, what are the things specifically that you're referring to? It's interesting that you should ask that.

Parapsychologists, and I don't classify myself as a parapsychologist. I am a psychologist with an interest in the psychology of paranormal beliefs and experiences. But parapsychologists tend to have a very strict definition of the word paranormal. They would limit what they're interested in. The core stuff that they're interested in is down to ESP, extrasensory perception, and that comes in three different varieties. You've got telepathy, the alleged direct mind-to-mind contact. You've got precognition, the alleged ability to know about future events before they happen, other than by just reasoning. And clairvoyance, the alleged ability to be able to pick up information from remote locations

without using the known sensory channels. You've also got the kind of motor side of the paranormal, which is psychokinesis, the alleged ability to influence the outside world by thought alone. And then you've got evidence relating to life after death, but that's it. So they wouldn't include things like alien abduction claims or astrology or alternative medicine or all this other stuff. and non-analystic psychologists like myself tend to have, and the mass media for that matter, tend to have a much wider definition of the paranormal

that is really anything weird and wonderful. And I think there's a kind of good reason for that because a lot of the things that would fail to be included in the strict definition, let's say, for example, you go to see an astrologer for a reading. You go to have your reading done and the astrologer will tell you all sorts of things or claim they can tell you all sorts of things about your personality, about what's happening in your life, about the future and so on and so forth. If you go to see a medium

they will do the same thing but they say that they're getting their information from the spirits of the dead so that would fit that the strict definition of paranormal the astrologer wouldn't but i think the psychology of what's going on is is the same in both cases so it'd be weird to study one and not the other so let me drill into, you said something a few minutes ago that a lot of people claim that there is no evidence, but you said there is. So what is it? Well, again, there's a whole, there are books written, there are journals, there's all sorts of effort going in. So I can give you two or three examples if you like yeah the late great carl sagan in in one of the last books he wrote before he died um he

pointed to three areas where he thought okay you know he was a skeptic uh like myself um but he pointed to two areas where he thought the there was evidence that was a challenge to the sceptics and that maybe there was something in these claims. One of them was the notion that by the power of thought alone, people might be able to influence the output from random number generators. In other words, a kind of a psychokinetic effect. These were very, very tiny effects, but they were highly statistically significant. So he felt that there was something there that needed to be explained. Also claims of children who claimed that they could remember living past lives. And the people who do the kind of research in this

area claim that these past life memories seem to check out and you know they say that again this is a real challenge to skeptics i think if my memory serves the other uh area he pointed to was something called the gansfeld studies these are studies of telepathy which involve having a sender in one room who is perceptually deprived. You know, they have headphones on listening to white noise. They have half ping pong balls covering their eyes with just a bit of cotton wool wrapped in a uniform red visual field. They lie on a bed.

It's very comfortable and your mind fills with imagery. And this is meant to be a telepathy conducive state. And so the idea was that this person would be the imagery that the person was allegedly picking up actually corresponded in some way to the video clip that the sender was looking at. So there were three areas where even, as I say, the great Carl Sagan thought there just might be something in it. And I would tend to agree with him. There are three interesting areas. And I could give you other examples as well. Having said all that, I remain a skeptic. I'm not convinced by the evidence. Well, one of the reasons that I'm also so skeptical about this is, OK, you laid out your evidence there and number of reported incidents of paranormal whatever. The evidence, there just isn't a lot of it. And because so much of this has been debunked and

fraudsters have been exposed, it doesn't balance out. Well, I think that sounds like the kind of thing that a certain type of skeptic would say, if you don't mind me saying so. I've written about this as being a kind of I make a distinction between what I call a type one skeptic and a type two skeptic. Now, bear in mind, I used to believe in a lot of this stuff. And then I discovered, as I said all the books by people like James Randi, Ray Hyman, all these other great, great sceptics. And a lot of that was about kind of debunking paranormal claims. And I'm not blaming necessarily those books, but I certainly went through a period where I would have said exactly what you just said. Well, it's all baloney. You know know, parapsychologists are all incompetent, they don't know what they're doing.

Anybody who claims to have psychic powers is either a con artist or they're deluded, you know, and so on and so forth. I don't believe any of those things anymore, partly as a result of actually meeting parapsychologists, reading the stuff that they write and realising that actually, you know, there are some very intelligent people on that side of the debate and they do know how to design an experiment and how to analyse data and so on and so forth. And when it comes to self-proclaimed psychics, the vast majority, in my personal opinion, obviously I can't go beyond that, but I suspect that most of them

probably genuinely believe that they do have some kind of psychic gift. There are con artists out there. There most definitely are. I mean, I've tongue in cheek recently kind of coined what I call French's second law. And that is the higher the profile of the psychic, the more likely it is that they use deliberately deceptive techniques. They know what they're doing. But I think the vast majority of psychics or people who call themselves psychics genuinely believe they have a gift. And the psychology there of what's going on is really interesting. What's going on that they can deceive themselves as well as lots of their clients that they have this gift?

Well, right, because just because they believe they really have this gift doesn't mean they really have this gift. Exactly. And so when we put them to the test, as we have on many, many occasions, and these are people I think that would not be silly enough to put themselves forward for a test, knowing that we'll have this very well controlled situation that they can't cheat. I think they genuinely believe they're going to pass the test, that they've got this ability. We design these tests in collaboration with the claimant. We get them to sign something in advance saying, this is a fair test of my claim. It's only when we run them through the test procedure, look at the results and say, well, we didn't see any evidence there of any psychic ability, that they decide it wasn't a fair test after all. And that happens time and time again. But that's a lesser strand of our research where we directly test paranormal claims. The vast majority of our research is, if you like, from that more sceptical perspective of saying,

well, okay, if these forces don't exist, how do we explain people sincerely believing they've had these weird experiences or they've got this psychic gift? And then we can design studies to look at things like the unreliability of memory or the relevance of false memories or hallucinatory experiences and so on. And that's generally what I think is going on in these situations. Well, isn't it? Well, first, let me ask you this. I don't know if he still does, but James Randi used to have a million dollars on the table

for anybody that could prove anything psychic under his controlled experiment, and no one's taken his million dollars. Well, people have tried. Yeah, exactly. I got to know, sorry. Exactly. They've tried. Yeah, no, no, they've tried. Yeah, exactly. I got to know. Sorry. Exactly.

They've tried. No, no, no. They've tried. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, nobody actually ever won it. I mean, I got to know James very well. You know, we were on Huggington. I mean, he's sadly no longer with us.

But yeah, no, he was a great hero of mine while he was alive. And he could be a crotchety old man with people he didn't like, but with people he did like, he was great. So I was a huge fan. And what Randy used to do, not unreasonably in my opinion, when somebody said they wanted to go for the million-dollar challenge, he would insist that before they went for the formal one-million1 million challenge,

they passed a preliminary test carried out by somebody that he knew and trusted. And so we ended up doing a lot of those preliminary tests. And what that meant was the claimants never got past the preliminary tests because, you know, we put them through a well-designed procedure and at the end of the day said, well no evidence of psychic abilities here so they never actually got to the to doing the uh the the formal one million dollar test uh which meant obviously randy had a lot less work to do and uh but yeah that million was there on offer for a long time and a lot of his critics a lot of his enemies would say oh it, it's a fix. You know, there's no way that that money's really there or that there's, you know, I know for a fact it

wasn't because I worked very hard with Randy in terms of designing those tests. And we would bend over backwards to meet any of the requirements that the claimants, you know, said they had. I mean, there's no point in testing them for something if they say well either that's not what i'm claiming i can do or i can't do i can't do under the conditions that you're suggesting so we would bend over backwards as long as it didn't compromise experimental control to try and make them as comfortable as possible uh make it as fair a test as we possibly could and time and time again they would fail the test well I'm clearly a skeptic when it comes to paranormal and psychic ability I mean if you're psychic tell me the winning lottery numbers for this week and and I know they say well it doesn't work that way and you know we don't do

it for the money and I said well take the money and give it to charity. I mean, so I'm not going to get sold anytime soon on psychic ability. But the one thing that really intrigues me is ghosts and haunted houses and things. Because I think everybody, I mean, I even had the experience when my mother died of getting a sense that, because I was in the room, of her leaving. And, you know, maybe that's just wishful thinking. Maybe that, I mean, I don't know what that is. But you often hear of people, multiple people, claiming that this one house is haunted. And why would all these people claim that?

And you kind of wonder, but then when you go there, or somebody goes goes there there's there's no ghosts well yeah well again uh there's a lot of interesting research on on that um i mean on the one hand you have got the kind of the power of suggestion which i think we often underestimate but i mean you'll know from this other context is all important in these situations. If you're being shown around a really old building and someone says, oh, and this room is supposed to be haunted, then it completely changes your mindset. When you go into that room, you suddenly notice every little creak and change in temperature and so on, you know, and it kind of feels a little bit,

you might get a sense of presence or a shiver down the spine and so on. And, you know, there's a nice little study done where they just had two different groups of volunteers being shown around a disused cinema. And one group were told that the place was just being kind of refurbished. And the other group was told that paranormal activity had been reported there. And they were asked to make a note of any anomalous sensations they had. And this is another thing that I think is quite an important point,

that typically when people talk about ghostly encounters, they're not talking about, you know, a full form apparition walking through the wall and walking across the room and back through the opposite wall, you know a full-form apparition walking through the wall and walking across the room and back through the opposite wall you know it's more things like a sense of presence or a shiver down the spine or feeling a bit dizzy or hearing strange noises it's much more kind of subtle anyway that the people who'd been cued that the cinema paranormal activity being reported there they reported more of these mild anomalous sensations. And certainly we know that, you know, people, when they suffer a bereavement, very often people will report that they can kind of sense the loved one still around.

And sometimes they find it very comforting. Right. And maybe that's wishful thinking that, you know, they're still around. But then you hear those stories about how the family was driven out by the by the spirits because they were just terrorizing them. And I don't know that that's ever been proven, but you hear those stories. You do. I mean, I mean, I remember as a kid, the Amityville horror was topping the nonfiction bestseller list. And at the time, I was naive enough to think, well, it must be true because it says so on the cover. I now know that that whole thing, the Amityville case, was just made up from start to finish. There was no truth in it whatsoever. What does history tell us about this?

I mean, I'm sure that ghosts and things have been reported forever how has that gone how has it changed what does it tell us in any society at any point in history there will be reports of of spirits but what's interesting is that the details change from one era to another and from one society to another. Now, that for me is a very strong argument in favour of scepticism, because you would think that if there is some kind of eternal afterlife, it wouldn't change from one culture to another. You know, it'd be fairly constant. So if you look at the ancient Greeks' idea of what ghosts were, they're very different from the modern Western idea. And if you go back to the Middle Ages in Europe, the ideas, again, were very different. So I think that's a strong argument for the sceptical

position that actually ideas about ghosts and the form that they are said to take is so influenced by the wider cultural belief systems. Well, no matter whether you believe in this stuff or not, it is so interesting that it doesn't die off. It doesn't go away. People keep talking about it. They keep reporting things. And it makes you wonder. Well, I mean, again, I find the kind of, I find the beliefs and the weird experiences. There's no doubt that people do have weird experiences. And then it's a question of, okay, how do you interpret what's going on there? I mean, people do have near-death experiences where it feels like they're moving down a tunnel towards a bright light, all that stereotypical

stuff and meeting spiritual guides and so on, that really happens. And so there's something really interesting happening in the brain while that's going on. And I'd be very, very keen that we study those things and try to get the bottom of them. Well, I don't know that we'll ever know the truth, at least not in this life, but it's always fascinating to explore. I've been speaking with Chris French. He is an emeritus professor and head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths University of London. And the name of his book is The Science of Weird, I can't say the word, Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal. And there's a link to that book in the show notes.

Appreciate you being here, Chris. Thanks. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. Are you one of those people who just dreads getting out of bed in the morning? If so, sleep researcher Leon Lack has some advice that will help take some of the dread out of getting

out of bed. First, choose your clothes the night before. It will take the pressure off and save you precious time in the morning. Turn off all your screens an hour before bedtime. It will improve your sleep and your state of mind in the morning. Have a glass of water at your bedside and drink as soon as you wake up. It will trigger your body to start working. Get out of bed and step outside first thing in the morning.

That blast of fresh air and the exposure to light will help reset your internal clock and get you going. And that is something you should know. We grow our audience mostly from word of mouth, people telling other people about it. And you can share this episode with someone you know. If you go to whether it's Apple Podcasts or Spotify, there's usually a way to share the episode with someone very easily. So please share this episode

and help us grow our audience. It would be appreciated. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up four hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you. In Don't Blame Me, we dive deep into listeners' questions, offering advice that's funny, relatable, and real. Whether you're dealing with relationship drama or you just need a friend's perspective, we've got you. Then switch gears with But Am I Wrong?, which is for listeners who didn't

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