Dawkins: Derren could you begin by telling me what cold reading is and how it's used?
Brown: Cold reading is I suppose the way that a complete stranger can seemingly
tell you everything about yourself without being psychic and without
knowing anything about you.
In essence the cold reader or psychic is supplying a lot of words
and you as the sitter, the other person are supplying the meaning to those words
And it relies on a lot of techniques, it's not really a question of forensic
body reading and the sort of things that people might,
it's not really normally even that clever.
There are linguistic tricks, which are unless you are aware of them are very
easy to fall for.
Those tricks can give the impression that the person knows everything about
your character or might refer to facts and things from your life
or from your past that can seemingly couldn't know about.
Dawkins: So if a psychic, a so called psychic, a trickster was trying to pretend
to guess, I don't know the name of the sitter's grandfather or something like that
what would be the kind of thing they might do?
Brown: Well very often even guessing the name of the grandfather if you backup
what tends to happen is that the psychic will, if in a group of people,
will throw out a name and say I'm getting the name John or Albert, some name that is
suitable for the age group they're working with.
Now that name could refer to a person in the audience whose living or it could
refer to someone that's died, or it could be a friend of the, or it really could be
anything so it's up to somebody to pick up on it and turn it into what they want it
to be and of course if they say "Yes that was my husband," then the reader can go
"Yes that's right, he's here, he's saying he still loves you" or whatever that is.
And they turn it back into, make it sound as if they were saying it was your husband
when in fact it could have been anybody, it could have been the name of person that
sat there. The kinds of methods that involved the Barnum statements are very
famous and well known about. There's a great experiment
Dawkins: Remind us what the Barnum statements are about.
Brown: There's a terrific experiment that was done on this with
students, I've filmed this myself we did it with three different groups
of people across the world, where you have everybody in the group
is given a reading, a personality reading and normally before hand there is some
nonsense about asking for their birthdate or getting some objects off them,
so there is some sort of process involved and they're given a reading. And it's a
long reading, it's very detailed personality reading and they all get one
individually, they're all asked to read it. And invariably they will all say
afterwards that it's very very accurate, it was not at all vague or ambiguous
of what people might expect. And they'll give it 85, 90, 95% accuracy.
I've seen this happen and people are amazed by it.
And then you get them to swap with each other and perhaps you can identify with
someone else by their reading and then they realize they've all been given
exactly the same thing. Which was written months ago before
I'd even met them. Those statements that fill those sorts of readings are generally
Barnum statements. And Barnum statements are things which essentially apply to
anybody, this is only part of the cold reading skill, but it's a major part of it.
Dawkins: It comes from PT Barnum,
Dawkins: the circus proprietor, Brown: That's right
Dawkins: Who said "We have something for everybody."
Brown: Something for everyone, that's right and famously
a sucker was born every minute.
These are statements along the lines of you're somebody who tends to keep people
Brwon: a little bit at bay but when Dawkins: You're a caring person
Brown: Yeah, you're caring, but you keep people a little bit at bay, you tend to
keep people at arms length but when you allow people into that inner sanctum
when they become your close friends, if they betray you then that really hurts.
And you're not saying anything other than closer to people that your close to than
It means nothing, absolutely nothing.
Dawkins: Horoscopes are the same? They use the same principal.
Brown: Yeah, because those things have to apply to anybody because there's no
interaction going on in a horoscope or even when everyone is getting the same thing.
There's no feedbacks so you simply rely on things that would apply to anybody.
What you can do when you're interacting with somebody is you can fork off from
one way or another. You can go one way or another depending
on the response you get. So if I said to you, "The spirits are telling me you've
got quite a temper," you could answer yes or no to that, you might agree or disagree.
Now if you agree with it, it feels like a hit, then I can say "Yes, that's right I can
sense you've got a real temper..." If you say no, I can say, "Well not on the
outside, what you've done it you've learned how to keep it contained,
but inside you're aware that there are some things that really knot you up and
make you very angry, but what's great about you is you've learned to control it
on the outside." And it still feels like a hit. Lingustically what they tend to do is
they say, they put the word "not" into the question so they will say things like,
one recent reading I was listening to was, she said "You haven't been drinking a lot
of water recently have you?" By phrasing it in the negative it allows a yes or no to
be a hit. And the answer was no. And she said "Well you should, the spirits
are telling you you need to be drinking more than you are, you haven't been
drinking much." It sounded like a hit, equally if the person said "Yes," it would
have seemed like yes they are telling me.
Then a common ruse also is to make statements that allow you to have both sides of the
coin in one go. For example if I said to you, "You've got an extrovert side and an
introvert side," that's not remotely convincing at all, that seems to be a
given. But if you say to somebody, "When you're at a party you're very good at
being able to hold court, you can entertain people, you're very good at
being the life and soul of the party," but what's interesting about you is that
when you walk away from that you often find yourself at home running back through
conversations in your head and wondering "What did that person mean? Why did I say
that, that was stupid." And when you're at those parties even if you'd like to
think you're somebody who can be in charge and charasmatic, you'll often
find yourself standing there thinking, "God, why am I here?" It's like everyone is
a million miles away and you're aware that is a facade that you have put on.
Now whether or not that applies to you, the fact is all I am doing is saying that
you've got and introvert and an extrovert side which cancels itself out, it means
nothing. And yet most people will find a way of sort of making that easily fit themselves.
Dawkins: Now when you analyze these things like the Barnum effect and cold
reading, you're doing it in sort of a rational way. I take it that the psychics
and palm readers and astrologers and people who do it know perfectly well what
they're doing, and therefore, they are fakes. But are all of them fakes or do some of
them somehow manage to fool themselves as well?
Brown: I think the difference is how good they are at it, which is unfair in a
way because it may be a bit becomes. Dawkins: The good ones are the fakes?
Brown: I think the difference is you can see when cold reading is at work, when you
know the tricks when you know the same old thing is coming out about an old box of
photographs at home with, and the tricks they come out with and they're pushing for
statements making somebody make a statement hit and if they don't, move on
to the next person. One I was listening to recently, you've been doing a lot of
spirit telling, you've been doing a lot of sewing, the woman was like no, has
someone in the spirit planes been doing a lot of sewing? No, she couldn't make a hit
so it went to the next person, is it for you have you been doing a lot of sewing?
And the woman was like no, she says well do you have a coat at home with a button
that's loose or a hem that's loose? No. (Dawkins laughing)
It wasn't working, and in the end she said have a look for that my dear they're
telling me there's a, you know it went from something to nothing. So when you
see that you clearly know that person they know exactly what they're doing,
they're desperately trying to get a hit. However, I think the people that are,
I've been to psychic college and training and seen people very sincerely trying to
learn and you know they've been told they believe they are a bit psychic,
because you know we all have a certain amount of intuition and if we
misunderstand things like out of coincidence and affirming because we've been thinking
about someone earlier that day and it's them we might mistake that for being
psychic if we don't really understand how those things can easily happen quite often
So I think there are plenty of people who learn it genuinely and really think that,
whether it's palm reading or tarot cards, that there really is a system and they
Dawkins: Do they go to a training course?
Brown: These things do exist, but you can buy books on it nowadays.
Dawkins: But I'm just trying to get into the mind of one of the instructors on the
training course. I mean the instructors on the training course are teaching cold
reading while dressing it up as though it was genuine, so they really are charlatans then?
Brown: I think so I think so. It's difficult because cold reading is
something you can be taught to do without it seeming like tricks.
I've been in a situation where training psychics sat around saying things to
each other like, "Oh I'm sensing..." Oh what were some of the great things I
heard. "Oh I'm sensing you're on a bus and the bus is going the wrong way but it
might not be a bus it might be a relationship."
When you hear things like that you think well "Okay this isn't cold reading, this is
just people sort of hypothesizing intuition and just learning to just
speak openly and I hope this other person is going to make it fit cause we are all
part of it and learning together. That seems sort of naive and a
bit of a shame.
Dawkins: Even when they are learning it all together they still are dressing it
up in their own minds as if the spirit were talking to them rather than.
Brown: Yes. It's just being intuitive and being open and being and just saying
what you feel that's all it is. It's this whole thing of intuiting your way to
enlightenment and knowledge, which is potentially a disastrous way of thinking.