Dawkins: The great Carl Sagan was always
being approached by people who claimed to
have been abducted by aliens. He made a
rather telling point. That if he were ever
abducted by an alien he would immediately,
since they obviously are brilliant
mathematicians and physicists, or they
couldn't possible have gotten here in their
space ships, he would ask them scientific
questions or he'd ask them "Please prove
Fermat's last theory, or the Goldbach conjecture."
The only thing the aliens ever talk about is
things like "We must be good to each other,"
and things like that which is totally
unoriginal. And it occurred to me that if I were
to listen to a medium calling the spirits
of the dead, wouldn't you, if you were talking
to a dead person via a medium, wouldn't
you ask them things like, "Well what's it like
being dead? Do you eat? Do you sleep? Do you
sort of have parties? Do you, you know...
What's God like?" All those sorts of questions.
But it's never that. It's "Oh well tell him
I miss him. And the dog misses him." It's always
so incredibly banal and unimaginative.
Brown: And also these tend not to go
anywhere either. I mean, when you listen to
the demonstrations in a spiritualist church it
really is just about what they believe they're
doing is supplying proof. So they're telling you
that, you know, you've a box of old photographs
in a cupboard and that you have got a scar on
your left knee from something when you were
young or you've had this or that accident.
Telling you these things to just sort of
constantly supply proof. They never really
go anywhere. There's never any sort of real
advice involved. Which maybe in a way is a
saving grace that you're not telling people
to go away and behave in a certain way.
But I don't think it ever excuses it at
any level. But yes it is mind numbingly banal.
And also you'd think if they really were able to
get some information at least get, sort of say
the names clearly as opposed to just sort of
giving letters here and there or being vague about
whether the name refers to themselves
or the person in the, you know, it's...
I was just talking about the illiogicality
behind so many of these systems and tarot
cards, which are obviously very very popular.
The deck is mixed and you choose a number
of cards that are laid out and then your fortune
and fate is read from them. Of course the
interesting conundrum there is that if you
did the same thing 5 minutes later you'd
pick out very different cards so presumably
your fate and the reading would be necessarily
very different if it's relying on those cards.
Five minutes later it would be completely
different. When there have been questions
about this the answer is always "Oh, well that's
because your fate changes from minute to
minute." But then you have to think, "Well, so
presumably to get a tarot reading you would
have to constantly be having a tarot reading
over and over again in order to know what the
accurate situation is if it constantly changes from
minute to minute." Does that make any sense?
Dawkins: I thought they claimed that the act of
shuffling was somehow guided by the spirits, so that
the right five cards come to the top of the pack.
Brown: That's true. But the right five cards,
you know, if I'm a tarot reader and we shuffle
and the five cards come out and those are the
five cards that dictate your fate, that's great.
And if you went away at the point that's fine.
I've told you your fate, and I've told you everything
Brown: about yourself, your past, present, and future. Dawkins: Oh I see what you mean.
Brown: But if you said let's do it again,
if you said "Great. Can we just do that one
more time?" Would you not expect the same
cards to come out if it's fixed? And if there
are other ones, then wouldn't we, you know,
but they do say, they say "Well it's because
your fate constantly changes. Each time you deal
the cards our, your fate changes from minute
to minute. So the only answer for you
is you'd have to consistently go back.
When would you stop? When would you have
the correct one? I don't understand that at all.
Dawkins: One of the psychics that did tarot cards
for me shuffled the cards, oh did she shuffle them?
I can't remember if I shuffled them or whether
she shuffled them. But I asked the question,
"But how do the spirits actually influence the
position of the cards?" And that was the point
where she gave up. It was a different one.
She gave up at that point because I was being
Brown: You were blocking the energy. Dawkins: I was being too inquisitive.
Dawkins: I was being too skeptical.
So that brought the thing to a halt.
Brown: I had the same thing with a palmist.
She started talking about, and I was trying to
be interested and I sort of was interested.
I'd never had it done before and I said
"So what is the link between personality and
your future, what's the theory behind how
that actually gets into the hand?" I thought
that would be an interesting answer. Same thing.
"You're blocking the energy, end of session."
From psychics to spiritualists to palm readers
to graphologists to astrologists, the expert
in question is either just simply deluded and
naive, or they're using a skill called cold reading.
Which is a way of communicating information
to somebody where it sounds like
they know everything about you and they can
reveal facts seemingly about your life and
describe your character in a way you'd be
amazed by. Whereas in fact it's a linguistic trick,
or a set of linguistic tricks, where they're
saying words and you are constantly supplying
the meaning yourself, but it can be very convincing.
Barnam statements are part of the tool kit
of the cold reading psychic named after the
showman P.T. Barnum who famously said that
he had something for everyone, and they are
statements which apply to everyone but
although they'll always sounds very specific
to the individual. Pretty much everybody's
had some creative pursuit at some point that
they've left behind them. And if I point that
out to you it might sound very insightful,
but really it could just apply to anybody.
Dawkins: It would certainly work for me.
Brown: Me too.
(laughter)
Dawkins: Do you think that people are ever
actually positively damaged psychologically by
attending seances with mediums?
Brown: I think there are certainly rare cases,
maybe not that rare, where people get
quite addicted to it, you know. If you've
lost someone who is very dear to you it's
an ugly situation if you get addicted to
a charlatan or a number of charlatans on stage.
If you go to every medium show you can
because you want to reconnect with
someone you've lost, I think that's damaging.
I think I remember reading, no this was told to me
by a friend of a woman who had been to
a rally given by Doris Stokes, who was a
famous medium a while ago. What Stokes'
people would do, they'd go to a new town
and they'd have any number of letters coming
in from people desperately wanting Doris
to get in touch with someone they'd lost.
So Stokes is turning up, she's got all the
information, she doesn't have to do any cold
reading at all. It's called hot reading when
you know the information up front. But what
they'd also do is they will go through the
papers and find any stories of accidents of
where people had been lost. And this woman
got a phone call from Stokes' people saying
"We know that you've, oh no, that Doris has got
a message from your son. You've lost a son
in an accident, is that right?" She said yes.
It had been in the papers. It was quite a well
publicized thing. "Well she'd like to give you a
message from your son. So would you come
to the rally?" And this woman asked "Well she
can't just give me this message on the phone?"
"Well no she'd really like you to come to the
rally where the spirits are." "Ok." So this
woman turns up. And she said, they also said
to her on the phone, "Would you wear like a red top,
or just something so she knows to identify you
so she knows where you are. We've got you a really
nice seat near the front. So this woman turned
up, a bit sort of bemused by the whole thing
but okay. And during the show after Stokes had
had a few misses and needed to lift it a bit,
she said "There's a lady over there in the red
jumper, over there, and oh there's a lovely lad
coming through to me now. He said he died.
It was a drowning wasn't it? Is that right my love,
is that right?" "Yes." She stands her up. "Yes that's right."
"Oh he's just saying it's a terrible thing
but he loves you. You're not to feel bad
about it. You're not to blame yourself."
And then goes over there. And the audience
are amazed because it looks like she's just
been able to, but this woman felt so violated.
Brown: It was such a transparently vile ... Dawkins: Why didn't she blow the whistle?
Dawkins: Why didn't she spill the beans?
Brown: Because she's in front of, I don't know,
two or three thousand people at the tent there
and it's confusing. It's one of those things that at
the time I think it's just confusing. It's like
"Ok where is this gonna go? Oh is that it? Alright."
And maybe it's only afterwards that you kind of think.
Dawkins: But she could have written a letter
to the local paper or something.
Brown: I don't know what she did. It was a
friend of her's that told me the story.
But I think there's not doubt that for a lot of
people it really isn't always all that convincing.
Brown: It could just, it's, you know it can be very... Dawkins: But even if she had blown the whistle
Dawkins: I just remembered a story of James Randi
about how he unmasked a psychic who was
Dawkins: using radio, he had an ear piece. Brown: Right, yeah.
Dawkins: And he had someone talking to him by radio,
who was feeding him information that he was
getting from the back of the room. And Randi
actually got an engineer to intercept the
radio frequency. And so he actually had a film,
which was shown on national television in America
of this bogus psychic calling spirits out and saying
"I'm getting so and so," and getting uncannily
accurate information and all the time the
television audience was hearing the
prompting voice that was going into
Dawkins: the ear piece. They were hearing it. Brown: Oh they were hearing it? I see. Right, yeah.
Dawkins: The man should have been completely
destroyed and what happened, he went on
with his career as if nothing had happened.
It's as though people just don't want to know.
They don't want these people to be unmasked.
And if they are unmasked it's almost as though
they just go into denial and cut it out. Or maybe
there are enough people who just haven't seen
that television show and so didn't know that
he'd been unmasked. But that particular
charlatan, to this day, according to Randi,
is doing a brisk trade despite
an unmasking which could not have been
more devastating you would have thought.
Brown: Yeah, psychics are going to be no stranger.