Selects: How ESP Works (?)

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Hey guys, it's Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2015 episode on ESP.

It's a really good one.

We talk about all sorts of things about ESP, including the science.

And I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking science and ESP?

Yes, indeed.

And that's one of the things that makes this episode so cool.

So I hope you will open your mind, tune in, turn on, drop out, keep on trucking, and enjoy this episode.

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

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there.

I didn't even have to look.

Why?

I just knew.

Yes, and dudes and dudettes, we are in our new studio.

Yeah, can you tell?

Does it sound different?

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

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

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

Oh, gotcha.

Yeah, yeah.

I was going to say, I said tiny, but it's not tiny.

It's cozy, but it is

all ours.

Yeah.

All ours.

Everybody else at House Step Works doesn't really know that yet, but they will.

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

Yeah.

And plus an alarm goes off at our desks.

Yeah.

What's that called?

DMR?

TMI.

Oh.

How are you, sir?

I'm pretty good.

I feel like this is fancy.

This is our first real studio.

That's not true.

No, I'm trying to remember.

The last one was...

No.

But it's not a utility closet.

It's not a lactation room.

It's not.

Yeah.

It's not a murder room.

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

Yeah.

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

Yep.

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

Got a couple of those waiting to go.

And we got to work on the lighting in here a little bit.

Yeah.

Jerry said she's going to hang some china balls for us.

Yeah, she keeps pushing the china balls.

So anyway, enough about that.

We just wanted to say we're super excited to be in our new office and our new studio.

It does feel good.

Yeah.

Kudos

for that intro.

I'm not going to say that I knew you were going to say that.

Yeah, I was going to say that too.

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

Yes.

ESP.

Do you believe in ESP?

No.

No, not at all.

What do you think it is?

Because surely, I mean, just about anyone could agree that humans have some sort of ability somehow to make good guesses or to predict the future, whatever you want to call it.

Do you agree?

Or do you think it's strictly just us selectively paying attention to random instances over others?

I think it's that.

And as we'll talk about, I think it's the

just the nature of

coincidence is going to happen

because so many things happen every day

that something is bound to

seem like something you dreamed about the night before at some point in your life.

Yeah.

But the other millions of dreams you have that don't, I think those are the ones that are the tell.

I got you.

You know?

Do you?

I don't know.

Like, I want to.

I spent so many years of my life believing in stuff like that.

Yeah.

And wanting to go to Duke University to study at their parapsychology department.

Did you really?

Yeah.

And, you know, believing in ghosts and all this.

And And just that's how I spent my childhood just reading about stuff like that voraciously.

So Ghostbusters really did a number on you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When that came along, I was like,

this was made for me.

Yeah.

But

as an adult, it's not so much that I believe in ESP.

It's more that I

refuse to just utterly disbelieve in the possibility of it.

Sure.

Okay.

You know what I mean?

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

Right.

But,

yeah,

I'm in the other camp, and I'm not even going to say the skeptic camp because

those people just bug me.

Has a bad name

due to some bad apples.

Not all skeptics.

No.

But there are some that are horses' asses.

Can we say that?

I don't know.

We'll find out.

All right, well, let's talk about, and I thought this was interesting because I never knew that ESP is just a big collective term for all manner of

paranormal phenomena, which you could also call psi.

Yeah, and so a dude named J.B.

Rhine, who we'll talk about later, he coined ESP.

The granddaddy.

And then in the 40s, another guy coined the term psi.

And psi is a Greek letter, and it's equated with psyche or the soul.

Yeah, P-S-I.

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

Yeah, sure.

And psi, he felt, suggested that this is a normal part of humanity.

We just don't understand it.

It sounds like science.

Right.

But there are several categories of ESP.

And this is the one I never knew, the actual definitions for these.

I sort of just threw them all in a bag together.

You have telepathy, and that's when you can, you know, you're over there reading my thoughts.

Yes.

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

That's not true.

He'd rather be at home on the couch.

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

Okay.

Well you're you're a telepath.

Right.

Clairvoyance, which is the ability to see events or things, objects happening somewhere else at the same time.

So are you doing, are you clairvoyant?

I am.

I'm seeing your couch right now and I'm seeing it's not that comfy.

Yeah.

So you're not missing that much at the moment.

I know somewhere Jonathan Strickland is waxing his head.

His bald head.

That's just a logical assumption.

Okay.

Then we have our precogs, precognition.

That's when you see into the future.

Retrocogs, retrocognition, you can see into the distant past.

There's another

widely accepted definition of retrocognition.

Yeah.

Like seeing a cave like Tuk-Tuk running around with the dinosaurs like you do, which I guess never would have happened.

But there's another term for retrocognition whereas

something in the future affects something in the past.

So a decision you make in the future affects your past.

And an example given is that

you have a dream about a dinosaur.

Now let's say a spotted dog.

And then the first thing the next morning you go outside to water your lawn and the same spotted dog or a similar spotted dog walks by.

The idea isn't that that was very coincidental or that you had ESP in your dreams, but that you seeing that dog in the morning affected your dream the night before.

Oh, okay.

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

Just weirdness like that.

All right.

Then you have your medium ship, and that's

Miss Cleo, who can channel dead spirits.

Yeah, I forgot about her.

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

She made a lot of dough.

I hope so.

Yeah.

I mean, she was working hard.

She had a finite window of opportunity, and she worked that whole time.

She didn't like buy a sailboat and sail around the world after her first million, you know?

Like she worked.

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

I see that argument.

Sure.

For sure.

I also see like if people want to spend their money on that and they get something out of it, knock yourself out.

All right.

And then you have psychometry, which is the ability to read info about a person place

by touching the person or object.

and that's what I like to call the dead zone.

Right.

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

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

Yeah, that is such a good movie.

Yeah, it really is good.

Chris Walken.

There's another one, Chuck, called telekinesis, which is like

Yuri Geller stroking a spoon and it bending.

Right.

Like being able to manipulate matter

just using a light touch or your mind.

But there is no spoon.

Yeah, wasn't that from Matrix?

Yeah.

All right, so basically,

like you said, J.B.

Ryan is the granddaddy of all this.

And he actually started studying.

I mean, he was a legitimate scientist.

He wasn't some quack.

And this was in the 1930s where he started at Duke University studying

parapsychology, basically.

And he wasn't the first.

He was one of the the first laboratory experimenters in academia to really study psi, right?

Before him, probably about 40 or so years before him, William James and some of his pals at the Society for Psychical Research

really laid the groundwork for applying the scientific method to the study of paranormal phenomenon.

And they did two things.

outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like very famously Madame Blavartsky.

But then they also investigated ones like they approached them typically with like an open mind.

Yeah.

And if they found somebody that they just couldn't explain, they would studied them.

So they were studying each one with an open mind, and the ones they figured out were frauds, they outed as frauds.

The ones they figured out

couldn't quite explain, they sought to investigate scientifically rather than just saying, oh, they're a fraud somehow.

So that was the groundwork of the study of Psy.

What was Madame Blavartsky's deal of the Coney Allen Blavartsky guy?

She was um she actually sh she was almost a cult leader.

You could argue she was.

She um

she created um oh man, it's called like theodism, I think.

Uh-huh.

Which is um

i it was it was almost a cult.

It was a huge um

movement in the nineteenth century where like you go to like a seance and there was a medium there and they would channel like the spirits of the dead, relatives of people who were there holding hands in the circle and stuff like that.

And she gained a lot of power and wealth and prestige until she was outed as a fraud.

And I don't remember the

it's theosophy.

That's what it is.

Not

theoism.

Theoism has to do with Theo Huxtable.

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

No, I haven't.

About the LA cult in the 70s?

I saw the icon on Netflix and never clicked.

Is it good?

It's really good.

And it's awesome, actually.

I recommend everyone see it.

It's one of those where, like, they interview a lot of them today, and they weren't like, you know, they didn't commit suicide.

Like, everyone was like, it was pretty great.

Yeah, they're all fine.

They're all just a bunch of hippies still.

They were out in LA?

Yeah, right in Hollywood.

There was one in, there was a documentary I saw about a cult in Miami.

And they were like super fundamentalist Christian.

Yeah.

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

Well, that's what the Source family was.

I wonder if they were related.

Well, it was the 70s.

Yeah.

There were a lot of pot cults, I bet.

But did they turn into like huge pot dealers?

No, I don't think so.

This cult did.

They had a band, though.

Called The Source?

You know, I can't remember the name of the band, but it's pretty interesting to look at.

Manhattan Transfer?

Yeah, that was it.

It's a really good documentary, though.

It's just funny to see all these people now.

They're like, it was awesome.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, that's kind of what's happening.

Nobody got hurt.

These guys didn't seem to have a lot of sex, though.

They were like real, like, compartmentalized gender-wise, like male dominance and all that, but they just smoked a ton of pot all the time, including their little kids.

Oh, well, that's not good.

Like four-year-olds smoking pot.

Oh, that's terrible.

Yeah, it was in the documentary.

It's worth seeing.

I don't remember what it's called.

You had me up, you lost me there.

I lost everybody there in that documentary.

Yeah.

All right, so back to this ESP thing.

J.B.

Ryan?

Yeah, J.B.

Ryan.

Well, basically,

there's a lot of different outlooks on what ESP might be.

Some people think that everyone's got it, but some people

it just pops up every now and then.

Like, I might have a dream that comes true or whatever.

Other people think that only certain people have it.

They have the gift, as they say.

Right.

And that they have to be in this special, like, you know, mental state to access it.

The shining.

Yeah, the shining.

And then other folks say that everyone has that potential, but some people are just in tune with it.

And some people aren't.

Right.

And you fall in the none of those three camp.

Yes.

So we'll talk a little more about

some ideas of what ESP is right after this.

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So Chuck,

you said that basically how people see ESP is either everyone has it, some people have it, or no one has it, basically.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer.

Right.

If you are a believer in ESP and somebody comes to you and says, okay, explain ESP, like what is it?

Right.

There's actually a couple of very common suggestions or proposals.

Yeah.

One made sense for a while before we knew a little more about the brain.

And that was that ESP was some form or fashion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we were receiving information from outside of our usual senses.

Yeah, and like you said, it fell out of favor because

basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves through time or there you didn't pick up on special some special part of your brain that like receives this message.

And there was a did you see that study I sent you that was I think from 2010 where they put people in an MRI and then showed them

different pictures or whatever.

And they did

they showed like they I put you in the wonder machine.

Okay.

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

And that's it.

Okay.

It's lovely, except it sounds like a German rave.

Okay, a little bit.

But that would be the non-ESP stimuli, the control group.

Yeah.

To test ESP and to see if the brain reacted differently, and then to see if there was a part of the brain that's picking up on ESP.

I would show you the flower, and then in the other room, I would also show Emily that flower and have her think about it and send you the thought of that flower.

So you're getting ESP stimuli and then non-ESP stimuli, and from the MRI, they show that the brain didn't react differently.

Gotcha.

So it suggests that there isn't a sensory organ or region of the brain that's responsible for picking up ESP, which doesn't debunk the possibility of ESP.

It just undermines the idea that there's a region of our brain that would be responsible for picking that up.

Plus, if Emily's over there, my first guess is going to be dog every time.

And it's flower and and then it's not going to be.

Well, it wasn't about guessing.

It was just to see like showing you

the ESP version and then the non-ESP version of the same thing.

So you weren't guessing.

Do you understand?

Yeah, I get it now.

I would have guessed dog or wine.

There wasn't guessing.

I still would have guessed.

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

She's got the shin?

Yeah, a little, she thinks.

Yeah.

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

Well, that's definitely one explanation for it.

Yeah, which we'll get to, of course.

So these days, there are other theories, one of which is that

it's called spillover, that there's basically another dimension that

doesn't have our laws here and our dimension.

And that sometimes stuff just sort of spills over from that and we see the future or the past.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, because this is something you can't prove.

Obviously, it's like completely,

and of course, they'll say it exactly.

Yeah, you know, yeah, and I think I got the impression from this article that they were making that point: like science is just chasing its tail and trying to explain ESP because it's not currently capable.

Yeah, and science goes,

it doesn't work like that.

Yeah, you know, at least with the electromagnetic spectrum explanation,

it was pointing to something that we already know exists, right?

It's just that

there's no way to show that we would be getting

how we would be getting information from it.

Because the electromagnetic explanation,

it basically says

if you compare it to other findings from ESP, it makes even less sense.

Right.

Because with ESP, one of the hallmarks of it is that no matter whether you're out there outside of the studio thinking about wine or a dog or something and I'm picking up on it or if you're in China and I'm here and we're doing the same thing the the signal doesn't weaken at all yeah and that just flies in the face of all we know about electromagnetic waves exactly no good right so there's a lot of things wrong with the proposals of what ESP is

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

Exactly.

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

And there's a, I mean, there's a lot of

evidence of

strange and unusual

occurrences

that support the idea of ESP.

Yeah.

This article gives a really good one about an 1898 book called Futility that was written by a guy named Morgan Robertson, right?

And in it, the guy details this book or this boat called the Titan.

A ship.

Yeah, a ship.

A boat.

A big old boat.

Yeah.

Which is sailing across the Atlantic and hits an iceberg at night and sinks, and a bunch of people die because there weren't enough lifeboats.

Yeah.

This is 1898.

And if that sounds familiar, the Titanic did the same exact thing.

The Titanic, not the Titan,

did the same exact thing 14 years later.

Yeah,

there are a bunch of similarities.

The Titan struck an iceberg in the book on the starboard side on an April night in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland, and the real Titanic struck an iceberg on the starboard side in April in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland.

On a starless night?

I don't know about that.

Okay.

They were both said to be unsinkable.

More than half of the passengers of the Titanic perished, and more than half of the passengers and crew on the Titan perished.

So there's all these things in there, but you do a little more digging, and you find out that Robertson was

a seaman, and he knew a bunch of this stuff, and it's not unreasonable to think at the time they wanted to build the biggest ships, and the word Titan would be a great name back then for a super big ship.

And that sailing route was a common one, and there were icebergs, and April might have been a common month for that kind of voyage.

So all of it can be explained away kind of

but it is definitely something you look at and go, ooh, interesting.

It is interesting and it's an amazing coincidence and it focuses the attention and captures the imagination.

But then, yeah, once you hear about Robertson's background, it becomes slightly less impressive.

So then kind of to

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

Yeah, is that true, or has that just been added?

I'm sure it was added over the years.

Okay.

Which is a big problem with this kind of anecdotal evidence, is that it gets embellished and

flourishes added.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's just, it's not enough that this is a really interesting, unique

circumstance or coincidence or whatever.

There has to be this extra layer of proof like it came to him in a trance.

Come on.

Yeah.

So back to Ryan.

He did some, like I said, in the 1930s, he started studying this stuff with one of my favorite inventions by his colleague Carl Zenner.

Of course, if you've seen Ghostbusters,

he was using a version of Zenner cards.

The shapes weren't all exact.

I think there was one that was different.

in Ghostbusters, but the original Zenner cards were, it was a deck of 25 plain white cards with each of them had one of five symbols, a circle, a plus sign, a square, a star, five-pointed star, and the three wavy lines.

Like water, a river.

Is that what that is?

Maybe.

Okay.

And the idea is that just like in Ghostbusters, you hold it up and

ask the, you know, not.

showing them the card obviously not the symbol and say what do you see and they say what they see and then you record after the deck how many they got right.

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

Sure.

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

telepathically.

Yeah, and I did, they have these online.

I took the test yesterday

and I went through the 25 deck and I only got six out of 25.

And at the end, it just said,

You are not a psychic.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I thought it was kind of funny.

Statistically speaking, for just one trial, that is more than chance.

You did better than chance, so maybe you do have a touch.

Six of, what would chance be, I guess?

Chance would be if there's five different ones.

It'd be 20%.

Uh-huh.

And so this was six of 24 would be

25%?

No, that's less.

No, no, no.

No, that's less.

Yeah.

No.

You did six of 24.

You did 24 or 25?

25.

So five of 25 would be chance.

Okay, so I got one more.

Yeah.

Well, and I think like

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

But I didn't know, like, it's randomly generated.

And so it's not like someone was on the other side thinking of that card.

So I literally, I was like, what do I do?

I was like, I'm just guessing.

So that brings up some interesting stuff.

Like, there's evidence that when a machine is involved,

there is no telepathy.

There would only be clairvoyance, right?

Yeah.

So, I mean,

if telepathy is you picking up what's in someone else's mind and a computer is mindless, then you shouldn't be able

what you were saying.

Like,

you should not be able to know what zener card it's going to pick next, right?

But there have been investigations using computers and using machines that show

above chance that there is some sort of weird interaction.

Like random number generators.

Yes.

Yeah.

So Princeton University has a department called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Department, PEIR, right?

Of course.

And PEIR has been doing studies for a couple of decades.

They've done millions of trials.

And basically they'll say this is a random number generator or this machine operates randomly or whatever.

We want you to think of a number.

And we want to see if you can influence the numbers that this computer spits out.

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

Like the human is trying to affect the computer the output the behavior of the computer of course if you're sitting across the room or in another room thinking about a number that a random generator should put out it should have zero effect whatsoever it's a computer the weird thing is is what princeton has found is that yes over enough trials you there is a slight very slight but measurable effect that human thought has on a random number generator.

Come on.

It's on Princeton's website, and this is stuff that is apparently accepted in the scientific community that the

trials that they are running are so widespread and so repeatable and have been done so many times that the data that they're coming up with is

significant.

Well, Ryan, with his ZinnerCard experiments in the 30s, did find that some people

got what they thought were pretty impressive results, like, you know, a few, I can't remember their names, but.

Hubert Pierce.

Was he one of them?

He was the one.

How many, what was his percentage?

He had one where he got,

remember how you got three in a row and you were like, oh my God.

Yeah.

He got 25 in a row once.

What?

25.

Come on.

No, I'm not kidding.

He was also documented as selecting 558 correct out of 1,850, which is the odds of that happening by chance were 22 billion to one.

Now, were these the early experiments?

Yeah, because, okay, because I did read that,

and this seems like, I can't believe he didn't check this, but apparently the early cards were a little translucent.

Oh, really?

Yeah, some of them were, and then he corrected for that, and the percentages went down.

And then they, I know other scientists said that you are somehow influencing with your body tell.

Right.

Like,

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

Yeah, in the earliest Ryan experiments with the Zenner cards, he would hold the card up

and he'd be making eye contact.

Right, the guy would, yeah, the guesser would be like, is it the wavy line?

Yeah, he'd start shaking his head

almost imperceptibly.

But he

he, that's called sensory leakage, where you, the person who is holding the card and knows what the card is, somehow there's some detail about your face that when you do a thousand trials with somebody, they start to pick up on, and it affects their guess.

It influences their guess.

So, to correct for that, to control for that,

a sensory leakage.

Gross.

Isn't that gross?

Yeah.

They came up with something called the Gansfeld experiment.

Ah, yes, the German Gansfeld.

That means whole field in German.

And that is when they started putting people, they would start depriving their other senses, basically.

They would be in

a dimly lit room with red lighting, and they would have white noise, and they would have their eyes covered with these special glasses.

Or ping-pong balls cut in half, like Kermit the Frog.

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

Exactly.

We've got the funding.

So, basically, the idea was: let's rule out any

of that

gross sensory leakage.

Which smells.

So, yeah, apparently, later on in Ryan's experiments,

after he started controlling for stuff, the percentages started to drop

of correct guesses.

That's sad.

He was also, he's generally a respected researcher for a couple of reasons.

One, whenever he did,

whenever evidence of like

some sort of bias or fraud or something was brought to him, he corrected for it.

Yeah, he wore glasses and a white coat.

Right, that was another one.

But also, he was daring enough to stake his entire career on

a field of study that will get anybody mocked

publicly, privately, can really shut down a lot of opportunities for you.

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

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

Yes, he did.

That was a huge criticism of him.

Gotcha, he wanted to believe it.

He was a definite believer.

He was quoted by, I don't know what the guy's deal was, but one day he was visited by one person, and the interviewer who went on to write a paper, I think, in Scientific American to expose him,

he said he kept a file of people, of the results of tests where

people he suspected were purposefully getting things wrong because they didn't like him to mess with his data.

He just took those and never published them.

He didn't include them in

the results, which would definitely affect the number of correct hits.

That was a huge criticism.

That's not good science at all.

But he was definitely a believer, which was another criticism of him.

But he was daring, and he did.

There was another story where it's called the Levy Affair, where a guy named Levy, who was an electrical engineer working in the lab, yeah, uh, unplugged,

I guess, a sensor that would correct negative hits for a little while during a trial, yeah, so that all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits.

Um, and so and then he plugged it back in.

Well, this one guy saw what the guy was doing and went to Ryan, and Ryan went to the guy, Levy, and said, Did you do this?

And Levy said, Yes, he's like, You're fired, and just like threw the results away and all that.

So he wasn't like, he was a true believer, but he wasn't just some like outright fraud.

Right, right.

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

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All right, Josh.

One thing you'll hear skeptics say a lot is: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Yeah.

And I have to agree with them.

Yeah.

And it is an extraordinary claim here.

And

so far there hasn't been extraordinary evidence.

And one of the things I pointed to earlier that I think is what's going on, if you look at statistics, you look at six billion people on planet Earth

and them thinking a gazillion things each day, and that is scientific, by the way.

A gazillion?

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

I have a great example of that, man.

Okay.

It happened this very morning.

What?

Yeah, it did.

I was at the printer.

You know, we just moved offices.

And I was at the printer, and I had like an extra piece of paper that I didn't need, and I realized, like, we have no paper recycling here.

So on my way back.

Not yet, that is.

To everyone out there, it's like, what kind of office would I recycle?

Right, we just said we have a

55-gallon drum that we throw stuff into that catches on fire.

Yeah, and then we send it out to the business.

We have a burning drum, that's what it's called.

No, we're getting those soon.

Right.

And we are getting them soon.

I know this because on my way back to my desk, I popped into Izzy, the IT guy who's also the head of all recycling and stuff here.

I was like, Izzy, we need a

paper recycling bins by the printer.

And he goes, I'm writing an email right now to everybody about that very thing.

You almost did your Izzy impression.

Yeah, it was close.

And so, like,

I thought about it.

That's pretty amazing.

Yeah.

You know, but it was about nine in the morning, and this is a company-wide email.

So, it would be something that Izzy would probably knock out about that time.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

We just moved into this office, and we didn't have bins yet, so it was still a potential thing for somebody to be thinking about, or doing, or writing an email about.

And so there's all these different really overlooked variables or factors to this whole thing that you don't think of.

Instead, it just seems like an amazing coincidence or ESP.

To me, the really significant thing was that I happened to be researching ESP while this happened.

That's what really kind of stood out to me.

But if you really kind of look at it, like there's a finite amount of things that people could think about in any given day, in any given context, in an office or something like that.

Like

had I been a goat at a petting zoo and I went over and talked to the cow and the cow was writing the email about recycling bins,

maybe.

But, or in an office, I'm talking to the guy about recycling bins.

There's just a lot of stuff that you kind of, once you take that into account, it becomes less amazing.

Like the guy writing the Titan Titanic book.

Yeah, you know what used to happen to me now that I think of it is I used to, and this, it's weird, it was only with phone landlines it hadn't happened with the cell phone but I used to like know the phone was gonna ring right before it rang oh yeah like almost go to reach for it

and it I mean it's not like it happened all the time but it happened enough times where I was like oh that's weird sure I know what you're talking about but I know it that was all it was to me I was not like I have the gift but think about it in in that respect too you know

15, 20 people.

So was it you knew who was calling or just that the phone was about to ring?

No, just that it was about to ring.

Oh yeah, that is weird.

You definitely do have ESP.

Yeah.

Or maybe, I don't know, maybe the phone made a little tick noise right before it rang that I didn't pick up on,

but only subconsciously, you know.

Well, that's another explanation for it.

Tick noise, I think.

Right.

That

there is subliminal stuff in the environment that is just too weak in nature for us to pick up on consciously, but our unconscious does or subconscious does, which frankly opens up a whole other can of worms, you know, as far as how real is that kind of thing.

But probably a little closer to reality is the idea that our attention isn't focused on everything that we're picking up at all times.

Like I see your beard and I see your shirt and everything, but I'm still also picking up like sensory information from like Jerry's computer that I can see in my peripheral vision or whatever.

My attention isn't focused on it, but my brain is still receiving information.

So the idea that our brains can put it together, all this information that we're not aware consciously that we're receiving,

but we're still getting impressions from it,

that could be a great explanation for ESP as well.

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

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

And it wasn't even the newer model.

This was back in the day when it was like

a ringing bell.

Sure.

So maybe that does explain it.

Yeah.

I've got another good example that I came across in researching this.

Let's say that you and I are hanging out.

Yeah.

And you're humming, baby, I'm a fire work, right?

Just over and over again.

I don't know that song.

But I'm reading,

yes, you do.

No, I don't.

Yeah, you do.

Who is it?

Katy Perry.

I don't know Katy Perry.

Anyway,

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

It was great.

Well,

it was hysterical.

What's up with the sharks being a meme now?

I think they were really significant.

Did she look like she worked at Corndog on a Stick?

I don't know what that is.

I thought all corn dogs were on sticks.

No, it's that place in the, or Hot Dog on a Stick, maybe it was called.

That place in the mall where they wore those big giant pinwheel colored hats.

No, I don't know anything about Katy Perry, but it was the funniest, most like the crazy just kept coming and coming and coming.

And I was like, this is the best thing I've ever seen.

So, anyway, in this universe, you're well aware of Katy Perry and her song Firework, and you're humming it to yourself.

But I'm sitting there reading The New Yorker, and I'm engrossed in it.

And I don't notice that you get up to go make some nachos, and you come back in, and you catch my attention because you're coming back in with some nachos, and they smell awesome.

And now, my attention is directed to you, and you're still humming firework, right?

Right.

And I'm like, I was just thinking about that song firework i had that in my head how crazy we must be connected yeah i didn't realize that you had been humming it earlier sure and beneath my awareness i picked it up although once i became aware that you were humming it it seemed to me like i had esp well yeah and that ties into another explanation is that people who do seem to have that gift are just really really hyper observant on minute details like the same people that can pick up on micro expressions

they might feel like they have the gift because they're just really in tune to what's going on around them and not just

like a big lunkhead walking around.

So, a lot of people who believe in ESP say,

yes, we agree with that, especially parapsychology researchers.

And there are still plenty of respected ones out there.

There's a guy named Darrell Bem.

Yeah, I saw that thing you sent.

He's been doing this for a while now.

Yeah.

Legitimately.

We should talk about him, but

to button up that point, there is

a lot of parapsychologists or even just plain old psychologists who are researching ESP

who say, yes, that definitely most likely accounts for almost all of it.

Right.

And that's good for us to be thinking about that.

And that in and of itself deserves academic inquiry and research, right?

But there are still some

experiments that are being produced by guys like Darrell Bem that are showing some weird results that go beyond this kind of explanation.

Yeah, and one of the problems, well, we'll talk about the problems with even this research

about it being reproducible in a second, but he did a couple of experiments.

This is from NPR.

Yeah, Krowwich wrote this.

Oh, really?

Yeah,

from Radiolab.

Nice.

I didn't know that.

These are the two that he pointed out.

He did nine different experiments, but the two that he highlighted was at Cornell, which is where Bem

does his work, right?

Yeah, and he's, again, a very respected psychologist.

That's right.

And this study of these experiments was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is a respected journal.

So the first one was a computer quiz.

They took 100 students, 50 males, and 50 women.

And

basically, they showed a computer screen with two little curtains on it side by side and said, behind one is nothing, a brick wall, and behind the other is something sexy yeah some kind of you know i was about to call it pornographic but who knows maybe it's art nakedness eroticism eroticism yeah

gross um

did it just make you feel like your dad's saying it or something yeah well this room's too small for you to see

um so basically he would say you tell me um what what you think you're going to see and they were all hooked up to uh to machines to read

what's going on in their body, of course.

And you would think it would be a 50-50 result, but they actually got a 53.1%

result for the what

Krowwitsch calls erotic stimuli.

And basically

they think, or at least that's what Bim thinks, is that

one possibility is that

if they think they're going to see something erotically stimulating, then

it got passed back through time.

Yeah, that's kind of his position, is that retrocognition thing.

Yeah.

That somehow their future selves who saw the erotic image was stimulated enough that that stimulation traveled backwards three seconds and influenced their choice.

Because they would be slightly stimulated physiologically, right, before they guessed.

And he said before the computer even chose which one to show.

Right.

Right.

They were making their choices often correct before the computer chose to show an erotic or non-erotic image.

And 53%, it doesn't sound like much, but Krowich points out a couple of things.

One, that when

there was a control group that was shown just non-erotic pictures, they did 49.8% correct, which is chance.

And they were 50-50.

And they were all not happy.

Right.

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

They're like, can we get a little steamier in here?

And he also pointed out that 53%, 53.1, to be specific, doesn't sound like much.

But

apparently, that's a 0.2%

chance

where on a scale of between 0 and 1,

where 0 is it's not going to happen,

and 1 is that it's definitely going to happen.

And apparently, as far as correlation goes or links between two things, something affecting another, a point two is about the same as the link between aspirin and heart attack prevention,

the link between calcium intake and bone mass, the link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.

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

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So stuff that we accept is like, yeah, yeah, if you're around second-hand smoke, you can get cancer from that.

This is probably the same thing.

It has the same exactly.

Yeah.

It is.

And later on, a meta-analysis meta-analysis of BEM's experiments, some other experiments that were carried out afterward, and then some other experiments all grouped together, a meta-analysis showed that

it wasn't statistically significant if you took all of the existing body of literature of these experiments.

Right.

But it was a new scientist article, and

it was pretty cool.

In the comment section, somebody said, yeah, it's not reproducible, but a lot of science isn't reproducible.

And it reminded me of our scientific method episode

where, like, apparently a lot of

trials that

pharmaceuticals aren't based on aren't reproducible.

Wasn't it like 50% of them?

Yeah, which doesn't surprise me, of course.

Yeah.

All right.

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

Okay.

You ready?

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

Because it's a little mind-blowing.

Yeah.

So, you know how, like, if you are studying something

and you write it down,

it gets in your brain a little more?

Yeah, yeah.

So that when you're tested on it later,

you will recall it more easily.

Yeah, that's a common study method.

Write something down.

Okay, so Bem carried out a very simple experiment that did the opposite of that.

First, he showed some people

a bunch of words, 48 random words.

I think nouns, like tree or something like that.

Yeah, and he told them to visualize it, though, right?

Right.

So they saw all 48 words and thought about them.

Not visualize the letters, but visualize the thing.

Right.

Like see the tree in your head.

Yeah.

Just to kind of try to memorize all 48 words.

Yeah.

Then the computer randomly selected 24 of those words.

Okay.

And then after they'd done that, Bem gave them a test of recall to see how many they recalled, right?

Yes.

So the people had to type out

the words they recalled.

Then after that,

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

Yeah.

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

Oh, okay.

So it's another example of that retrocognition that these people

getting the words in their heads after the test somehow went backward and influenced their recall and memory

for the tests that they took before they learned them.

That makes more sense.

A little.

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

Right.

So this guy published this stuff in like 2010.

Yeah.

And like it was, it made a huge, huge splash, huge criticism.

The academic journal was criticized and Ben was pilloried and all that.

But he still

put out these

very reproducible, understandable, simple exercises that still showed, statistically speaking, there were some significant results that went beyond chance.

So when it comes to debunking ESP, one thing that you're not going to, you know, you said fraud, you're not going to see a lot of people call researchers outright frauds because that's just sort of a dangerous thing to say.

Sure.

It's not nice.

But there are people out there who, I guess, are criticized for you know, basically trying to call out,

and this is something completely different, but these on-stage psychic shows, like crossing over with John Edwards, yeah, like it's easy to pick those people out and say, You're a big fraud, and this is not true, of course, and all you're doing is cold reading.

Uh, cold reading we talked about in the animal

pet psychics episode, right?

Right.

That's basically when you get up on stage and you say, Sir, I'm sensing um someone there, you're having some trouble with

another man in your life

with a name of J or is it H or O?

Maybe P.

Or maybe it's P.

Yes, P, my boss.

Peter.

Yes, yes, exactly.

And that's all a cold reading is, is throwing out these really broad things that anyone can latch on to.

So it's really easy to call those people out.

And there's a guy,

sort of a guy famous for doing that.

His name is James Randy.

And he's famous for his offer of $1 million

to anyone that can prove their psychic ability, which, of course, no one stepped up to do that.

But then he gets poo-pooed a little bit, like you're just making a mockery of

trying to legitimately disprove something.

And mockery is absolutely the right word.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

Right?

So like what you're dealing with then with a guy like that is

a set of beliefs, a belief system running up against another belief system.

Right.

Just like a couple of religions or something like that.

It's not objectivity against fraud or anything like that.

It's belief against belief or something.

Yeah.

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

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

Yeah, that's just, they call that theatrics just like the onstage theatrics of a a stage psychic.

Yeah.

So I believe I totally agree.

Yeah.

You know?

I do too.

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

Sure.

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

Nice.

That's my motto.

You got anything else on ESP?

Let me think.

No.

I've got one more thing.

I found, I came across a 1990, I think, five nightline with Ted Koppel.

Yeah.

Where the news broke that the CIA had been studying ESP and trying to do remote viewing, what Ronson was talking about and the men who stare at goats.

Oh, yeah, John Ronson.

When it finally became declassified in 1995, Ted Koppel did like a 20-minute nightline segment on it.

Totally worth watching.

It's some pretty softball questions, but Robert Gates, who would later become the

head of defense, he's on there just basically trying as politely as possible to show that he does not believe in any of this, even though he was the former CIA director.

And it's just neat.

Plus, you get to watch Coppel again.

Right.

He was great news, man.

Yeah, I miss those dudes.

I miss.

I was just thinking yesterday about Brocaw.

Yeah, rather.

I was always a Brokaw man.

Did you?

I liked Peter Jennings.

He was great.

Yeah.

All of them were great.

I don't even have any idea who does nightly news now.

I don't watch it.

It was Brian Williams until about a day ago.

Did he get fired?

He got.

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

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

Wow.

I think this is getting big quick.

Interesting.

Yeah, Twitter's involved.

Oh, man.

The Twitter takedown.

Yeah.

If you want to know more about ESP, the internet was virtually set up for you to go find out more about it.

You can start by typing ESP in the search bar at howstuffworks.com.

And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

Yeah, before we do listener mail, mail I just want to give a quick shout out to my buddy Isaac McNary

if you remember I did a Judge John Hodgman episode with Emily in which I did a bad home renovation and

this dude stuff you should know listener from Kansas Carpenter master carpenter said hey man I'll come and stay with you and help you do your your project there right and I said this sounds crazy and he actually came and did it and it looks awesome yeah and he's a super cool guy and if you're in Kansas the near el daredo kansas there's no better guy to hire the favorite in the city of el dorado kansas it's el daredo actually okay he has to point out but um not only is he a great carpenter and a cool guy but he works with a non-profit called outreach program uh it and you can find it at outreachprogram.org where they're basically feeding the world

They package food and they get people together in a room and package these mass quantities of food to send to other countries and feed the hungry.

Gotcha.

And he's just a really good dude.

So thanks to Isaac for that.

And my kitchen list looking good.

So again, for his nonprofit, that is outreachprogram.org.

And if you need a great carpenter and you're in Kansas, check out RetroFit Remodeling.

Nice.

All right, listener mail, I'm going to call this Pronunciation Help.

Hey guys, I'm a botanist and just wanted to throw you a rope.

to help you out with pronouncing plant family names.

All plant family names end in A C E A E.

Oh yeah, I thought I got that wrong.

It is a mess of vowels guys.

When you read it you should just imagine you were spelling A C E as in

A C E

so when you read a plant family name just break off the A C E and read the first part and then spell A C E.

So the plant family for poison oak is

Anacardia

Anacardia C E.

So it's just Anacardia C E.

I remember it by imagining the aneurysm and cardiac arrest I would have if I fell into it.

A-N-A-C-A-R-D-I.

What?

Well, she spelled out Anacardi.

Oh, gotcha.

The first two first letters from each of those words.

Anyway, guys, I love your podcast.

I find it endearing when you two puzzle out on pronunciations.

A-C-E.

A-C-E.

That's good to know.

Yeah.

So I love you bunches.

And that is from Jane.

And she said, P.S.

In Europe, they pronounce plant families completely differently

Other parts

Other parts of the US might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is standard in California oh well

Okay what AC AC

If you want to let us know something that we should have known before we even recorded but you're generous enough with your time and effort to correct us, I guess is a way to put put it.

Sure.

That was very helpful.

Thanks a lot, Jane.

If you want to be like Jane in other words, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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