Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There

"Richard is a very good friend of mine. I love spending time with him because he’s very entertaining. He’s very intelligent, he’s very creative, he’s incredibly funny. Not only is he a member of the Magic Circle, he’s a member of the Inner Magic Circle. He knows how the mind works and he also knows how magic works at a practical level. The book of his I’ve chosen is Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There. He writes very well. All of the books I’ve recommended are very clear and well written, but Richard also includes lots of interactive examples, that the reader can try for themselves to demonstrate a particular psychological effect. It’s something that I try to do a little bit of in my own book and when I’m doing talks. It’s a great way to engage the audience—not just tell them about something, but actually show them, demonstrate it to them, get them to feel what it’s like for themselves. See if you can implant a false memory into the members of your audience or the illusion that you’ve just read their minds. That really brings it home to people how they can be mistaken about these things. Yes, a medium is someone who claims that they’re getting information from the spirits of the dead. That was an example of me using a technique called ‘cold reading.’ I’d been contacted by a researcher for a daytime TV program because there was going to be a series on BBC2 about psychics. I told her that con artists use cold reading to trick strangers into thinking they know all about them, and she talked me into giving a demonstration of how it worked. I was quite nervous on the day. They had a volunteer who had been told that I was psychic and would do a reading for her. The first rule of cold reading is to get the cooperation of your client. So I started off by saying to her, ‘I’m a little bit nervous. I’ve never done this in front of TV cameras before. Also, I usually spend at least an hour with each of my clients, but we’ve only got 10 minutes. To speed things up, is there anybody in particular you’d like me to make contact with?’ So I immediately found out that granddad was in spirit and I took it from there. It worked really well. I had very mixed feelings about it, because I didn’t want her to feel that we were trying to make her look stupid. It’s one of those situations where if you just hear about it, you think, ‘I’d never be fooled by that,’ but actually, with a good cold reader, you probably would be taken in. I’m an amateur, but I’ve watched friends who are skilled cold readers. I know they’re using cold reading but I’m still thinking, ‘How did they figure that out? Where did that come from?’ It’s really very impressive. So that was an interesting experience. We did say to the volunteer if she didn’t want it to be broadcast, it wouldn’t be, but she was happy for it to go ahead. He’s got sections on cold reading. Some of his examples come from his background as a conjurer because there is a lot of overlap. They’re simple conjuring tricks, but if you don’t let on they’re conjuring tricks and pretend they’re the real thing… Some people say that’s what Uri Geller did. I couldn’t possibly comment, but I do have lots of friends who perform the spoon-bending stunt. They’re all conjurers and they all say it’s a trick. It’s not psychic. They point out that if, when Geller does it, he’s using psychic powers, he’s doing it the hard way because it looks exactly the same when you do it as a trick. So there are a lot of examples like that in the book, optical illusions, those kinds of things. I think people like it when there’s something that they can experience for themselves in a psychology book, and say, ‘Wow, that really does work.’"