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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 HowStuffWorks 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.
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 like an office with like desk, like office furniture.
Yeah.
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 come.
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.
No, not at all?
No.
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 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.
Do you?
I don't know.
I want to.
I spent so many years of my life believing in stuff like that and wanting to go to Duke University to study at their parapsychology department.
Did you really?
Yeah.
Believing in ghosts and all this.
That's how I spent my childhood, just reading about stuff like that voraciously.
So Ghostbusters really did a number on you.
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.
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 Psy.
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 Psy, and Psy 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.
You're 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'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.
Oh, okay.
Well, 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 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.
That's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition, like seeing a toot-toot 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.
An example given is that you have a dream about a dinosaur.
Let's say a spotted dog.
Okay.
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.
Okay.
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 mediumship, and that's Miss Cleo, who can channel dead spirits.
Yeah, I forgot about her.
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 like 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.
It's such a good movie.
Yeah, it really is good.
Chris Walken.
There's another one Chuck, called telekinesis, which is like Uri Geller stroking a spoon and it bending.
Right.
Like being able to manipulate matter just using a light touch of your mind.
But there is no spoon.
Yeah.
Yeah, wasn't that from Matrix?
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 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 oh right um, really laid the groundwork for applying the scientific method to the study of paranormal phenomenon.
Yeah, and they did two things they outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like very famously madame blavatsky, 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 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 or couldn't quite explain.
They sought to investigate scientifically rather than just saying oh, they're a fraud somehow.
Right.
So that was the groundwork of the study of Psy.
Right.
What was Madame Blavatsky's deal of the Coney Island Blavatsky size suit?
She was – she actually – she was almost a cult leader.
You could argue she was.
She created – oh, man, it's called like theodism, I think, which is –
It was almost a cult.
It was a huge movement in the 19th 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.
Yeah.
Theoism has to do with Theo Huxtable.
Did you see The Source Family, by the way, that documentary?
No, I haven't.
About the L.A. 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 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.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah, they're all fine.
They're all just a bunch of hippies still.
They were out in L.A.?
Yeah, 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.
There were a lot of pot cults, I bet.
But did they turn into 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 listen to.
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 this one did, too.
And nobody got hurt.
These guys didn't seem to have a lot of sex, though.
They were, like, real, like, compartmentalized gender-wise.
Right.
And, 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 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, the gift, as they say, and that they have to be in this special mental state to access it.
The shinnen?
The shitting.
And then other folks say that everyone has that potential, but some people are just like in tune with it.
And some people aren't.
Right.
And you fall into none of those three camps.
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.
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 it didn't pick up on some special part of your brain that receives this message.
Did you see that study I sent you that was, I think, from 2010 where they put people in an MRI?
Yeah.
And then showed them different pictures or whatever.
And they did, they showed, like, 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.
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 showed 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.
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 we that doesn't you know have our laws here and our dimension yeah, and that sometimes stuff just sort of spills over from that and we see uh, 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 um, And of course they'll say 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.
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 signal doesn't weaken at all.
Yeah, and that just flies in the face of all we know about electromagnetic waves.
Right, exactly.
No good.
Right.
So there's a lot of things wrong with the proposals of what ESP is.
Yeah, but the reason why people still believe in this stuff is because of either hearing a story about their friend who said listen, this crazy thing happened, 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 lot of evidence of strange and unusual occurrences.
Sure.
That support the idea of ESP.
Yeah.
This article gives a really good one about an 1898 book called Futility.
Yeah.
That was written by a guy named Morgan Robertson, right?
Mm-hmm.
And in it, the guy details this book or this boat called the Titan.
Mm-hmm.
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 uh, he 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 right, and that sailing route uh, was a common one and there were icebergs and April might have been a common month for that kind of.
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 thing.
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 there's flourishes added.
Urban legendized.
Yeah, exactly.
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 Zinner.
Of course, if you've seen Ghostbusters, he was using a version of Zinner cards.
The shapes weren't all exact.
I think there was one that was different in Ghostbusters.
But the original Zinner cards, where 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 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... Is that 25%?
No, that's... 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, 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, it shouldn't, 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, PAIR right.
Yeah.
Of course.
And PAIR has been doing studies for a couple of decades.
They've done millions of trials.
Yeah.
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 you're – okay.
That makes sense.
Like the human is trying to affect 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.
No, it's a computer.
The weird thing is is what Princeton has found is that yes, over enough trials, 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.
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 intercard 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.
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.
25.
Come on.
No, I'm not kidding.
He was also documented as selecting 558 correct out of 1850, which is the odds of that happening by chance were 22 billion to one.
Now, were these the early experiments?
Yes.
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.
Percentages went down.
And then they I know other scientists said that you are somehow influencing with your body tell right, like you.
Basically you don't have a good enough poker face.
Yeah, in the earliest Ryan experiments with the center cards he would hold the card up and go and he'd be making eye contact.
Right, the guy yeah the guesser would be like is it the wavy line?
Yeah, he'd start shaking his head, almost imperceptibly.
But he that's called sensory leakage, where you, the person who is holding the card and knows where 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... What's it called?
A sensory leakage.
Gross.
Isn't that gross?
Yeah.
They came up with something called the Gansfield experiment.
Ah, yes, the German Gansfeld.
Right.
That means whole field in German, and that is when they started putting people.
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.
Right.
Yeah.
Which smells...
So yeah, apparently later on in Ryan's experiments, after he started controlling for stuff, the percentages started to drop.
Yeah.
Of correct guesses.
It got 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.
Yeah, sure.
Publicly, privately can really shut down a lot of opportunities for you.
This guy and his wife, Louisa Ryan, 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 really want to prove this is true, was he?
Yes, he did.
That was a huge criticism of him.
He wanted to believe in 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, right.
That was a huge criticism.
That's not good science at all.
But he was definitely a believer, which was another criticism.
But he was daring and he did.
Yeah unplugged, I guess, a sensor that would correct negative hits for a little while during a trial, so that all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits.
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 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.
All right.
Well, right after this break, we'll talk a little bit about what skeptics say about ESB.
Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about, your couch.
Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.
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Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet, with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.
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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.
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.
We just moved offices.
And I was at the printer and I had an extra piece of paper that I didn't need and I realized we have no paper recycling here.
Not yet, that is.
Everyone out there is like, what kind of office would not have recycling?
Right.
We have a 55-gallon drum that we throw stuff into.
It catches on fire.
Yeah, and then we send it out to sea.
We have a burning drum.
That's what it's called.
No, we're getting those soon.
Okay.
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 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 9 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.
Yeah.
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.
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 we're 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?
I used to, and it's weird, it was only with phone landlines.
It hadn't happened with a cell phone.
But I used to know the phone was going to ring right before it rang.
Oh, yeah.
Like almost go to reach for it.
I mean it's not like it happened all the time, but it happened enough times where I was like huh, that's weird.
Sure, I know what you're talking about.
But that was all it was to me.
I was not like, I have the gift.
But think about it 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.
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 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.
Yeah, 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 running.
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 firework, 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 didn't 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 corndogs 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 uh no i don't know anything about katie perry but it was the funniest most but like the crazy just kept 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 katie perry and her song firework and you're humming it to yourself but i'm sitting there reading uh the new yorker yes 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.
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 microexpressions.
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 Daryl Bemm.
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 like academic inquiry and research, right?
Yeah.
But there are still some experiments that are being produced by guys like Daryl 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, Krolwich 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 BIM does his work right.
Yeah.
Yeah, and he's, again, a very respected psychologist.
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.
Does that just make you feel like your dad's saying it or something?
Yeah, well, this room's too small for you to say this.
Yeah.
So basically, he would say, you tell me what you think you're going to see.
And they were all hooked up 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 531 result for what Krowich calls erotic stimuli.
And basically they, they think or at least that's what Bim thinks is that One possibility is, 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.
Right.
And he said before the computer even chose which one to show.
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 Krolwich points out a couple of things.
One that when there was a control group that was shown just non-erotic pictures, they did 498 correct, which is chance.
50-50.
And they were all not happy.
Right.
They're 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 53 531, to be specific, doesn't sound like much, but apparently that's a 02 chance where, on a scale between 0 and 1, where 0 is it's not going to happen and 1 is that it's definitely going to happen.
Yeah.
And apparently, as far as correlation goes or links between two things, something affecting another, a 02 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, exactly.
So stuff that we accept is like yeah, if you're around secondhand smoke, you can get cancer from that.
Interesting.
But this is probably poo-pooed.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It is.
And later on, a meta-analysis of BEMS experiments, some other experiments that were carried out afterward and then some other experiments.
All grouped together, a meta-analysis showed that they weren't.
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 yeah where like, apparently a lot of um trials that that like, pharmaceuticals are based on aren't reproducible, isn'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 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, right?
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.
Yeah.
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 test.
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 test 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 made a huge, huge splash, huge criticism.
The academic journal was criticized, and Ben was, you know, pilloried and all that.
But he still, you know, 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 onstage 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.
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 someone.
You're having some trouble with another man in your life with the 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 um, sort of a guy famous for doing that.
His name is um James Randy, and he's famous for his offer of one million dollars right 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.
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 stage psychic.
And I totally agree.
Yeah, I do too.
Do 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 1995 Nightline with Ted Koppel where the news broke that the CIA had been studying ESP and trying to do remote viewing, what Ronson was talking about in 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.
It's just neat.
Plus you get to watch Koppel again.
Right.
He was great news, man.
Yeah, I miss those dudes.
I was just thinking yesterday about Brokaw.
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 anymore.
It was Brian Williams until about a day ago.
Did he get fired?
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 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.
Since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail.
Yeah, before we do Listener 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 episode.
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 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, near El Dorado, Kansas...
There's no better guy to hire.
The fabled city of El Dorado, Kansas?
It's El Dorado, actually.
Okay.
He has to point out.
But not only is he a great carpenter and a cool guy, but he works with a nonprofit called Outreach Program, and you can find it at outreachprogramorg, 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 is 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 are 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 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.
Find it endearing when you two puzzle out on pronunciations.
A-C-E.
A-C-E.
That's good to know.
Yeah.
So, love you bunches.
And that is from Jane.
And she said, P.S.
In Europe, they pronounce plant families completely differently.
Other parts of the U.S.
A-C.
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 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 iheartradiocom.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet, with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.
Just ask the Capital One bank guy.
It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way.
He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.
Thanks, Capital One bank guy.
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Hey, it's Bobby from The Bobby Bone Show.
I had an incredible time at this year's iHeartRadio Music Festival and even got the chance to hang out with Diplo and Bailey Zimmerman while I was there.
How did Ashes come together, Diplo?
I pulled up real quick.
He was about to leave on tour.
You're about to jump in your tour bus, and we had like three hours.
It was really cool.
He really just like randomly showed up to my house.
I'm like, oh, hey, Diplo, what are you doing?
He's like, I have a song that I want to show you.
And I was like, okay.
You can listen to the full episode out now wherever you get your podcasts.
And big shout out to my friends at Hyundai for making this possible.
Had a blast cruising around the festival weekend in the all-new Palisade Hybrid.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
