Richard Wiseman's Reading List

"Yes, James started his working life as a magician. Then he became an escapologist, following in Houdini’s footsteps. And like Houdini, he was very sceptical about the paranormal. Since the 1970s he’s done a lot of very high-profile debunking. Flim-Flam! had a huge impact on me when I first came across it, because it was the first time I’d seen a whole volume which wasn’t taking any nonsense, which wasn’t saying “maybe this stuff is true”. It’s a hardline approach that looks at a whole range of issues. Things like the Cottingley fairies, the Conan Doyle case, spoon benders, psychic surgeons – he says that’s all essentially tricky. What impressed me was that he got out into the field, he did the research, and it wasn’t a “maybe some of this stuff is true” approach. He was simply saying, “None of it is true and here’s what’s really going on.” He has a long-standing financial reward if anyone can prove under test conditions that they’re psychic. There are various people who act as testers for him in various countries – I’m one of them in the UK. I’ve tested a few people. And it probably says something about the psychic world that in the 10 years that the prize has been up for grabs, no-one has come even close to claiming it. I tested a woman called Patricia Putt who was convinced she could give psychic readings for people, and that they would recognise their past and present in those readings. So we had lots of people come in, she would write down her readings, then we showed them to people and said you had to choose yours out of all of them. And suddenly they were at a loss. That’s because when you go for a psychic reading you know it’s meant for you. You’re sitting there, there are all these ambiguous comments, you can read into them and suddenly be impressed. Once you take away that mechanism everything collapses. James had a long-standing feud with Uri Geller which occasionally ended up in the courts. The bottom line is James is saying spoon-bending is sleight of hand and Uri is disputing that, but again if Uri were up for proper testing then we could settle the issue once and for all. A million dollars – quite a large sum of money – is sitting there waiting for the first psychic who can prove they have these abilities. Good question. If there’s some evidential side to it. If someone is just saying “I believe in God and can’t offer evidence for that”, it is faith and that’s fine. There’s nothing science or psychology can do with that. But as soon as they say “I’ve produced this twinket from the Gods” or “I can part the seas” or “I can cure illness” – as soon as there’s some sort of physical manifestation of that belief – then scientists and psychologists can do some business. Again the results will be the same as the other kind of psychic testing – that people don’t have these abilities. Certainly I think they were intended to convince people that there is something weird going on. And lots of people do believe in God because of the miracles. So I want to say, “Hold on. Before you make that leap of faith, at least hear what the scientists have to say. You may not be convinced by it, but at least hear the arguments.”"

"It’s a great book. It’s fairly old now, but a readable introduction to a psychological take on the whole of the paranormal. He takes it away from talking about people’s experiences per se. Randi is looking, for the most part, at people claiming to be psychics. Rather than looking at psychics and mediums, Jahoda looks at our own everyday psychology. Why is it that we touch wood and cross our fingers? Why are we superstitious thinkers? It’s a very early but very important treatise on that topic. To some extent. Certainly there’s some anthropology in there. He talks about the fact that good luck charms have materialised right across the world. The notion of amulets to bring you good fortune appear in pretty much every culture in the world. He argues that there’s something very deep-seated in us that revolves around the notion that we live in a very uncertain world. We’re worried about the future, and anything that can give us some certainty – even in the absence of hard evidence – is a very appealing psychological thought. Thus you get amulets and all sorts of superstitious behaviour. We know that is the case from polls and surveys. As I said at the beginning, more people believe in this stuff in the US than in the UK. And when you go from the West to the East, the numbers tend to be very high. So something is going on culturally. There seems to be some kind of bedrock, something in our brains which tells us this stuff is true and we should believe it. But the exact form it takes is often molded in the culture. If you take sleep paralysis – and the idea that there is an incubus on your chest sucking the life out of you, paralysing you – in some cultures that’s seen as an old hag coming into the room, in other cultures it’s an alien, in some it’s an evil spirit. The experience is the same, but the way it’s interpreted is very different from one culture to another. It is a very scary experience. You can’t move and you may find it difficult to breathe. That alone is terrifying. But once you understand the science of it, it is less scary than thinking there are spirits on you."

"David is another person who had a lot of influence over me. He was teaching at University College London when I did my psychology degree there. The Psychology of the Psychic , along with Flim-Flam! was one of the first sceptical books that I came across. David is a very good psychologist and his is a more detailed approach, focusing on parapsychological research – laboratory based research into ESP – and really dismantling some of those experiments. He said, this is what you’ll read in the journals and newspapers but this is what’s actually going on. It was the first time I’d seen someone take a look at scientific paranormal research in that way. There are all sorts of claims but the notion is that, rather than there being a small number of people with amazing powers, all of us to some very small and unreliable extent have ESP – extra-sensory perception – and therefore could tell something like the order of a shuffled deck of cards. To demonstrate that, parapsychologists get lots of people in a lab, shuffle the deck, get people to guess the order and then put all their results together and see if they do better than chance. The argument is that a very small and unreliable effect emerges. And David’s book is one of the very first to cast a sceptical eye over that literature. It’s a very wonderful book. There was one conducted by the US military to see if you could have psychic spying – what’s going on at this particular coordinate, or what’s going on in Russia. David pointed out these experiments had a lot of fundamental flaws to them. It’s like a detective story. You have to go deep into the experiment to understand exactly how it works and where the problems can be. I’ve conducted this sort of research too. It’s enormously time-consuming, but quite fun. If you look at reviews of Paranormality on Amazon, they are bimodal. Most people like the book and then a hardcore group giving it one star really loathe it, saying how much they dislike me as an individual. So yes, it is an area which attracts an enormous amount of controversy and bad blood. If you are very thin skinned it’s not the area for you. Often the debate gets nasty quite quickly."

"This is a more recent book. He takes a wider perspective on the paranormal, looking at UFOs and conspiracies. His argument is that we’re very good at finding patterns – that’s one of the reasons why science has been so successful – but sometimes that mechanism goes into overdrive. If you take something like finding a face in the environment, the brain would rather see a few faces that aren’t there than not see one that is. So you can look into the darkness of the bushes and see a face that isn’t there, and convince yourself that it’s a spirit or ghost. Exactly. Michael takes a more broad-brush perspective and argues that these things are hard-wired into our brain – it’s one of the consequences of having such a successful brain, if you like. His main thrust is that people believe weird things because they have evolved to find patterns. And that gives rise to a lot of paranormal experiences. So they’ll have a dream, they’ll witness some events and they’ll see parallels between the two, even if one is not causing or predicting the other. He mostly sticks to the topics we’ve spoken about – ESP, psychics and mediums – but he goes beyond the other books when he talks about conspiracy theories – where people link up ideas which aren’t necessarily connected to one another. We like to think, when it comes to conspiracy theories, that there are big causes. With Princess Diana’s death, a big worldwide event, it’s hard to think that the cause of it was something relatively trivial, like a car accident. People think there must have been more going on, that there must have been a whole conspiracy behind it. I think to some extent you can. But with religious belief it’s slightly different because there’s a need to believe. It’s rather nice to think there’s a God who is benevolent and looking after you. Also there are very large cultural forces. Up until reasonably recently it’s been the norm to believe – you’re told from a very young age that you should believe. With a conspiracy theory, there are obviously not many people who believe in them. So in that sense they are more psychologically interesting. When from a very young age people are told that something is true, it’s not quite so surprising that most end up believing it. Creationism is somewhat different because there you have evidence [for evolution]. So in that instance you have to explain away a huge amount of evidence against your position. One of the reasons it’s such a terrifying belief is that if you can do that – if you’ve got the mental gymnastics to explain away the evidence – you can probably convince yourself of absolutely anything. Then it just comes down to what you want to believe. And some of those beliefs are extremely bad for society. So it’s similar to ghosts and the paranormal. The evidence is not on your side, so how do you explain it away? We don’t like dis-confirming evidence so we either ignore it, not read about it, or just say people are lying or there’s a conspiracy. It comes down to that fundamental ability to believe something that’s not true."

"I like Mary Roach as an author, she makes me laugh. What I like about Spook is that it’s a rather fun, light-hearted tour through all the weirdness that researchers have tried to examine. She talks about near-death experiences, seances, experiments where they weighed dying animals in order to weigh the soul as it left the body. All these strange experiences are the kind of quirky psychology which I love. The psychology of the field is quirky too. It is a deeply weird field populated by deeply weird people. That is where the movie title comes from. This was an American psychologist around the turn of the 20th century who put dogs onto scales, trying to weigh their souls leaving. He had some success with that, then tried the same with humans – putting very old people on the scales and waiting for them to die. But what he didn’t control for is sweating, moisture leaving the body. So 21 grams is probably much closer to the amount of moisture you lose when you die than your soul. A near-death experience is very similar to an out-of-body experience, which is where people think they’re floating away from their body, turned around seeing their body lying there. In a near-death experience, there is often a tunnel of light you go down towards meeting your maker. The gods you see depend very much on the culture you live in. Then the god turns you back, you return into your body and you wake up. As we know more about how the brain creates a sense of where it is, we know more about how these experiences can be created. Now there are experiments where we can create an out-of-body experience fairly rapidly. Other researchers – and Mary Roach talks about these – write target numbers or words on pieces of cardboard and place them on top of cabinets and wardrobes in hospital wards, in the hope that somebody having a near-death or out-of-body experience will look down and see them. To date they haven’t. Which again suggests that this is an illusion rather than a genuine experience. It’s a good question. I guess my answer is that it doesn’t, because by the time something is scientifically proven it’s no longer occult. There have been instances where something has been going on in the weird world of the paranormal, but by investigating it properly we’ve found out what that is. The most obvious example is homeopathic medicine, where there is a placebo effect. You’ve taken a substance and it does make you feel better. That’s what’s behind homeopathy and a lot of other alternative medicines. We could have just thrown the baby out with the bathwater and said this is all nonsense, we’re not even going to bother investigating it. But as we’re doing science properly we found out that there is such a thing as a placebo effect, that it can be harnessed for good and so on. I guess that is where we fly closest. I think placebo is the wrong word there. There is a large amount of evidence showing that meditation of all different types is good for you. And that would be a kind of meditation – where you are putting aside the normal contents of consciousness, as it were, and trying to quiet the body and quiet the mind. That seems to have a very positive, beneficial effect on a lot of people. Again it’s another area where it would be easier to say there’s nothing going on scientifically, but if you do the research properly you see there is something not magical but deeply psychological and potentially beneficial. Well, there are lots of ways of doing it. The easiest is to go to the toilet with the spoon and bend it backwards and forwards until you get a fracture line across it. Then you smuggle it back onto the table and introduce the idea of spoon bending. Pick it up, and a bit of wiggling on the end of that spoon will break it clean in half. So if you don’t want to spend years developing your psychic skills, that’s a quick way of doing it."