All Episodes
Previous Next
July 1, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:38
Edition 401 - Professor Caroline Watt

This time a 2019 update from leading paranormal researcher Professor Caroline Watt at Edinburgh University...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
If you've sent an email or a communication recently into the show, thank you very much.
It's always good to hear from you.
You can do that through my website, theunexplained.tv.
And when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And if your email demands an urgent answer, then I'll make sure that it gets one.
And if you haven't heard from me, please remind me and I will step on the gas, as they say.
And I couldn't do this show, which I've now been doing for 13 years, without you and your support.
If you've left a donation for the show recently, thank you.
And if you haven't, please do consider doing that because it's vital to maintain this independent work online.
You know, whatever happens to my other activities here, the show online will continue for as long as I'm able to deliver it here.
And that's, you know, something that I've been promising that I would continue to do for 13 years, and I think I've come good on that up to now.
So there.
Summertime continues here.
Very nice in London.
I hope wherever you are, life is good.
Now, the guest on this edition of the show is somebody we've had on here before.
She holds one of the most important positions in the unexplained world.
She holds a title that is the cursed lecher of parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
It is a very important position because it is involved in some of the most groundbreaking and important research in all of the fields, or many of them, that we discuss here.
Things like telepathy, the idea that there might be life after death, which a lot of people we've had on this show certainly ascribe to.
So it is an important position and an important institution.
We're going to catch up with Caroline, find out what she's doing at the moment, and also talk about issues like making sure that research is repeatable and accurate.
Because what is the point of academics going to the trouble, and of course these days the expense, of doing research in these fields, unless it is reliable and unless it makes a contribution to the ongoing development of knowledge in these fields.
So we'll talk about that and some other interesting work that she's done.
Remember, if you want to get in touch with me, I'll say it one more time before we get to Edinburgh and talk with Caroline Watt.
You can go to the website theunexplained.tv and follow the link and send me an email from there.
And just a word of thanks to not only the people who've been discovering the show month by month here, which they do, and you tell me that.
And it's nice to hear from new listeners wherever in the world you happen to be, but also to the people who've supported me through all of the years.
And I'm thinking here, and it's maybe not too fair to name names here because I'm going to miss a lot of people out, but you know who you are.
Like people like Kev and Jonathan and Ed.
And there's a guy in Portugal, Laurentino, who gets in touch an awful lot.
And Robin and Aid and Connor and Harmony and, oh boy, and my friends in Farnborough, Hampshire, and my friends in Sydney, Australia, and my friends in Melbourne, Australia, and in Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo, Japan, and so many other places.
You know, thank you so much.
It means a lot to me because otherwise I'm going to be sitting here in this place where I've been sitting doing podcasts for 13 years now.
And sometimes you put them out and you think, I wonder if anybody's going to hear this.
And then, of course, you hear back from people and you find out that they have heard it.
And we've been on an interesting ride, haven't we, over these years?
And that ride is continuing here.
There's another pledge, and it's one I hope that I'm able physically and in every other way to come good on as these years go by.
All right, let's get to Edinburgh, Scotland now to Caroline Watt, who holds the very important Curse the Chair of Parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh.
Caroline, thank you for coming back on.
Thank you very much for having me, Howard.
Now, Caroline, the first time you came on the show, you very kindly gave me a potted explanation of what the Curse the Chair that you hold is.
I wonder if, for people who haven't heard you before and are new to this, if you could just do that again for me.
Well, we're quite an unusual research group, and we started with a double suicide of the author, Arthur Kersler, and his wife, Cynthia.
And that was in, I think, 1983.
And they left their entire estate to support the establishment of a chair of parapsychology at a British university.
And Edinburgh University, because it already had a researcher in the department called John Belloff, who was doing parapsychology, Edinburgh was open to the idea.
So they agreed to host this chair and to essentially take the money and set up a professorship.
And the first professor was an American called Bob Morris.
Sadly, he died in 2004.
And I worked with him for probably 20 years.
I started in 1986.
And eventually, I got promoted into the professorship that sadly was vacated when Bob died.
So I started the professorship in about 2016, so a couple of years ago now.
And is part of your job coming up with the ideas for areas to research, or is that done by a team of people?
Well, it's really, we're lucky when we're academics, we have a lot of freedom to come up with ideas.
Usually they don't come out of the blue.
They're often based on previous work, other researchers' work that we're wanting to build on it or to extend on it.
So the work that I do, it's things that I'm interested in, but they're usually following up on previous lines of research.
It is an unusual thing for an academic institution to do this.
And I know Scotland is a great centre of research in these fields.
And I'm very pleased that it has been, but it has led the way in many, many ways.
And we can go back through history.
People like Professor Archie Roy and those people, they were all based in Scotland.
So you have a history there.
But scientific institutions, of which Scotland has some of the best in the world, it's unusual and it's interesting that scientific institutions would want to get involved in research of this kind.
And I'll tell you why.
Very recently, I interviewed one of a number of people in various fields that I interview about the afterlife or the claimed afterlife, the thought that when we shuffle off this mortal coil, that's not all there is.
There is something more from there.
And I spoke to a man at Caltech in California, professor there, who'd gone in the newspapers and been quoted as saying, in fact, the newspapers didn't entirely accurately quote him, but the bones of it were correct.
He said that the idea of there being an afterlife was, quotes, plausible, which gave him a tick in the box if you do a show like this one.
But then he went on to say, but there is no scientific evidence, and it doesn't really look like there ever will be, for that.
In other words, a scientist would say that most of this stuff simply has, well, they would either say it's bunkum, or if they were being nice, they would say there is absolutely nothing to support anything in the field of parapsychology, psychical research, and all the rest of it.
Yeah, yeah.
So you're wondering, we've...
Well, or me or my colleagues, the fact that I'm at Edinburgh University, which is one of the leading institutions, research institutions, I guess.
And I think those scientists who say there is no evidence, and my experience is they often are not familiar with the evidence.
So they may be going on hearsay or just casual acquaintance, if you like, and they haven't actually studied the evidence in great detail.
And those who have, I think, are a little bit more cautious about making firm conclusions or firm sceptical conclusions.
So they, for example, pardon me, would probably agree with me that the quality of the research, for example, that we're doing, the methodology, is pretty high.
So the argument that parapsychology, well, just a bunch, when you get a positive result, it's due to sloppy methods.
That doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
So that easy dismissal doesn't last if you actually start to look at the evidence.
Or indeed, not necessarily sloppy methods, Caroline, but perhaps perfectly understandable from where I'm sitting.
The desire of the researcher, because you're working in the field of parapsychology, Ergo, you must be interested in it and want it to be so.
The desire of you to want the phenomena that you're investigating to be apparent.
Well, it's certainly true.
Every researcher has an expectation.
And when they're testing a hypothesis in an experiment, they have an idea that they want to follow up.
But I think in parapsychology, the researchers have come into the field for different reasons.
We're not all the same breed, if you like.
And there are definitely some who might have come in because they've had a powerful personal experience that's really made them curious and they're looking for some support, if you like, empirical support for their personal experiences.
And there are others, I would put myself in this camp where I started off as a psychologist and I'm aware that the surveys show that a large proportion, maybe about 50% of the public, report some kind of paranormal belief and I'm including religious belief in that definition.
So as a psychologist, the interesting question is why do so many people believe in the paranormal and what might lie behind it?
And of the people who say they believe in the paranormal, about half of them think they've had a paranormal experience.
So that's about one in four of us, basically, believe we've had a paranormal experience.
And so for me as a psychologist, that's just an interesting question.
And I'm curious both as a psychologist as to what normal psychological factors could lie behind some of these experiences.
And also, the reason why I approached Robert Morris and said, you know, I would love to work with you.
I think this is fascinating.
You know, it's interesting too and challenging to try to test in a controlled way the idea that people really do have psychic abilities.
So it is a testable hypothesis.
So you can do good science and it's quite challenging to try to do good science on this work.
Are you somebody who came into all of this, presumably you are, because you wouldn't be doing this otherwise, as a believer?
No, actually.
I mean, I hadn't had any personal experiences.
So I did my degree, and my first degree was in psychology.
And it was more a sort of curiosity.
You know, I'd like to read books.
And I think one of the first books, popular science books I read was by Lyle Watson, a book called Supernature.
And I'm sure some of your listeners will have read that as well.
And so I always had a curiosity about the subject, but not because of personal experiences.
And I guess I just came into it thinking as a psychologist that this is an interesting area to do work in.
It's a relatively small field, so there's lots of work to be done.
There's lots of unanswered questions.
So it felt like an area where you could make an impact and it would just be an interesting place to work.
And it turned out that way.
So I've been there ever since.
So that's over 30 years now.
I've been at Edinburgh studying parapsychology.
Do you think that in the future, when and if we more properly understand what is behind some of these experiences, some of these phenomena, that any of this work will have a practical application?
Well, it's a very good question because in the lab research looking at telepathy, you know, the mind-to-mind communication, the effect sizes are relatively small.
What that means is that people in our experiments are not really producing ESP on demand.
It's a bit patchy, it's a bit unreliable.
You might think of it as a bit of a kind of poor quality radio signal in a way.
And if that's the truth of it, if ESP does exist and if it's kind of weak and unreliable, then it would be quite difficult to put it to practical use.
But I think what's happening at the moment is parapsychologists are trying to find the sort of recipe to boost the effect size, if you like, or to boost the signal.
I'm saying signal with inverted commas because we don't really know if there is a signal.
How can you boost a signal if you don't know where it's coming from?
Well, we don't know where it's coming from, but we can look at the factors in an experiment that are associated with positive scoring.
So for example, in what we call spontaneous cases, which are real-life experiences that people think are psychic experiences, often there's an altered state of consciousness involved.
For example, in dreams, for example, people often think that they have dreams that predict the future, or they might even get telepathic information in dreams.
And then mediums, they go into trances when they try to get information from the afterlife.
There's some evidence from research in hypnosis that that might also be beneficial.
So there are various different lines of research suggesting that being in an altered state of consciousness may be beneficial or sort of facilitate the appearance of a psychic information.
So that could be one factor in a recipe, if you like, for success, that you would create an environment that tries to simulate the real-world kind of dreamy, sleepy state that people are in when they have, often, when they have these experiences.
So does that mean you try to get people into a sort of meditative state?
Yes, the method that's been used most often to do this is called the Gansfeldt method.
And it looks a bit weird.
The person lies back in a really comfy chair.
They wear headphones that play white noise, which is a sound a bit like radiostatic.
And they have eye shields on and a red light shining in their face.
And they have their eyes open.
So the effect is like lying, sunbathing, if you like, on the beach with your eyes closed.
All you see is this kind of red fog in front of your eyes.
And all you hear is this white noise.
And you're feeling very physically relaxed.
And in these experiments, you might do an actual, maybe a 10-minute relaxation exercise to begin with, just to get the person comfortable.
And then their job is to start to report out loud impressions that they're receiving.
And the idea is that this stimulation, this Gansvelt, which is essentially, it's like, it's not quite sensory deprivation, because you're not being deprived of information, but you're getting unpatterned information.
Your eyes are only seeing red.
Your ears are only hearing white noise.
Your body is very comfortable, so you're not getting any signals from your body.
But when you're in that situation, you might start to get very sleepy, kind of maybe not meditative, but you would start to notice your internal imagery a bit more.
Okay, but you're not receiving much input.
Isn't part of the human condition then that you will then start to try and create input?
Exactly.
That's what the researchers are trying to do when they use this method.
Think of it as a sort of stimulus hunger.
That when we are normally we're bombarded with information from our senses, from our normal senses, and if you take all that away, the brain starts to produce imagery.
So it's almost like it's entertaining itself by coming up with visual images and sensations.
Not really hallucinations, you know, they're not very vivid, but it's active.
It kind of keeps your brain keeps active.
And parapsychologists are hoping that some of that imagery and impressions that you're receiving while you're very relaxed in the Gansfeldt will be related to the ESP target that somebody is looking at and trying to send to you in a distant room.
This is delicate and long-term research, though, isn't it?
It's not something you're going to get results with, well, as far as we know, in a flash of fire and a quick explosion.
No, it's quite a, even one session takes about an hour and a half.
And parapsychologists have been doing this since about the mid-1970s.
And it's quite a slow way of doing research, but the results actually have been fairly good over the years using this method.
So this is an area I'm interested in.
When you asked at the beginning about where did the ideas come from, and what I'm doing is looking around to see what lines of research seem to be promising and how can I build on these and sort of try to kind of improve the database that we've got, the understanding that we've got.
So you were asking about the recipe for success or how do you boost the signal.
So that's one thing is to use the right kind of environment to try to make the person more receptive and more able to notice things that are going on inside their head.
But normally we're so distracted we don't necessarily notice unless we're particularly good meditators, for example.
And the other factor is looking at selected subjects.
So that is which participants in the past have done well in this environment, who have scored best.
And there are some patterns that there's been some consistent findings there.
That is individuals, now you mentioned meditation, that's one thing, individuals who've practiced a mental discipline of some sort, such as meditation, maybe because they're better able or more accustomed to noticing what's going on inside their head and remarking on it and making a kind of comment on it, but then letting it go.
Also, individuals who are creative or artistic appear to do very well in these experiments.
The highest scoring has come from studies with artistic or creative participants.
And we're not really sure why, but that's happened a few times now, and probably about half a dozen studies have found really good results using that kind of participant.
And the other thing is participants who have some belief themselves in the Paranormal, or who have had experiences, prior ESP experiences, they also seem to do well.
I wonder why that would be.
Well, I mean, maybe they have some natural psychic ability, or you know, so they are genuinely having psychic experiences, or maybe it's that they're more, they feel more positive about coming into the lab.
You know, it's less scary if you already think that you have some ability or if you've had some experiences and you're open-minded to it.
Perhaps it's the case that the believers are more comfortable when it comes into the lab and therefore they might perform better.
So we don't know all of the reasons why there are particular types of people who do well.
So even though parapsychologists have been doing this work with this method, the Gansfeld method, for decades, there's still some very simple questions that we don't have answers to.
So when you ask about how do we boost the signal, I think there's still some work to be done to try to figure out what's the recipe.
I'm mixing my metaphors now, but what are the ingredients for making the strongest possible signal so that you could then make some possible practical use, for example, of telepathy?
Let's not use mobile phones, let's use telepathy instead.
Now, have you been seeing in the, I don't know how you chart this, but in whatever data that you use, do you see small blips from the control or the norm?
Or do you see some individuals who have giant leaps in their accuracy?
Well, these experiments tend to be done with a large number of participants all at once.
So they don't just focus on one individual.
So typically, they might have 60 or more participants, and each participant just produces one data point.
So they have one trial, if you like, in the experiment, or one attempt to get information about the remote target that the sender is seeing.
And this is information that you have got somebody or something else generating quite close by, is it?
Yeah, that's right.
Well, we call it the targets.
And typically, the target in these experiments is something like a video clip, a short video clip, maybe one minute long.
And it could be anything.
So it could be from a movie, from a cartoon, from a nature documentary, from a home movie.
And in these experiments, you start off with a pool, maybe 200 possible clips, and you randomly select one of these to be the target in the particular session that you're running.
And that was shown then to the sender who's in a distant room.
And they mentally try to communicate the content of the target clip to the receiver.
The receiver doesn't know what the target is, and the experimenter doesn't know either.
So you really have to make sure that the only person who knows the target is the sender, and they're locked in a room across the campus, for example.
So that's the typical target information in these experiments.
And a lot of this is going to come down, or is it, to interpretation of the people who are actually doing the research.
In other words, if you get a number of people who say, I see a man in a white overall carrying a bucket of paint and a ladder, if you get a number of people saying, giving some details that are quite vague about that, but they all look the same, some of that's going to come down to the reporting and the recording of what those people have said, isn't it?
Because they're not, you know, very few of them, I would think, would say, if the video is of a man carrying a ladder and a bucket of paint and a white overall, the kind of descriptions you're going to get are not going to be precisely that.
Absolutely.
It's very rare that the participant in the Gansfeldt gives a sort of unambiguous, clear description of the actual target.
You know, they're talking out loud for maybe 25 minutes, and there's going to be some dross in there, as well as hopefully some impressions that are related to the target.
But how do you filter out, if somebody says, I see a white cloud passing by, how do you filter out that the person who's notating this, taking it down, doing the research, isn't going to say, ah, you mean a man in a white overall?
Yes, yeah.
It's a really good question.
How we do it is we have decoy targets.
So for each session, there are four randomly selected clips.
One of them is the actual target, and the other three act as decoys.
And at the end of the sending period, the participant, usually the person who's been describing their impressions, they are asked to judge their impressions, whether it be a white cloud or a man in a coat, whatever, against the four different video clips.
So we know that just by chance, you will get correspondences, as you said, particularly if you try very hard, you'll be able to see connections anywhere.
So these other three target clips act as a sort of control for that.
And the idea is that if there is any psychic information coming from the sender who actually saw one of the four, the target clip, then there will be more similarity between the participant's impressions and that target compared to the three decoy targets.
So that allows us to do statistics on the results of the session.
So it doesn't come down to judgment at the end of the day.
The session chooses, the participant chooses one of the four clips and says that's where I'm kind of placing my bet, as it were.
I think that's the one that was the target.
And so you can then calculate, you know, just by chance, if you've got four target possibilities and it's just random choice going on, that the participant will correctly identify the target one in four times.
So your chance baseline, which is basically no ESP, would be 25% success rate.
And if there's more information coming through about the actual target, then you'd expect what we call a hit rate, the success rate, to be greater than chance.
And that tends to be what these experiments find.
Not all the time, and it's not a massive effect.
I think the biggest effect has maybe been about 50% success rate.
More often, the success rate is around about 30%.
Higher success with artistic participants.
So it's not a massive improvement in scoring, but it's a statistically significant one.
And we don't have an explanation for that that suggests it's due to some faulty design, for example.
There are those who would tell you that when you put large groups of people, and I mean populations of people, together, all pushing towards a common aim, like maybe praying for the healing of a person or something like that, it has a propensity to happen.
Now, in this research about gaining impressions and being accurate about defining what the target is, does it make a difference how many people you have?
You know, does the accuracy go up as you increase the number of people?
Because if it does, that would indicate that there is a kind of group consciousness going on, wouldn't it?
Yeah, I mean, these experiments test, although I said that they test a large number of people, they're not all tested at the same moment and on the same target.
So there might be 100 participants and they come in on 100 separate days, and each one has a different target.
So they are not all working together to try to identify a single target.
And there is actually a slight problem if you were to try to do that.
If you're trying to do a mass test where you got all the participants together, it creates a bit of a statistical problem that we call the stacking effect, which is that people tend to not be independent of one another in the ideas that come to their minds.
So to give you an example, if there's been a story in the news about a natural disaster, and then you ask people to relax and talk out loud about what's coming into your head, and a lot of people might talk about the natural disaster because that's salient and significant to them at that moment.
And so you'd get a sort of patterning in people's responses that they're not totally separate from one another.
And if you treated each of these as a separate data point, that would basically create false evidence for ESP.
So it's better to do just one participant at a time to avoid that statistical problem.
And do you only get people in once?
You know, somebody doing research with you, do they only come in once or do they come in again?
And if they do come in again, do you ever get an indication that people get better at this?
Yeah, most of these experiments, in a single experiment, they would only test a participant once.
They sometimes ask the participant, do you have previous experience of PSI research or what we call PSI, so it's doing research in parapsychology.
And there's some evidence that those participants who've had previous experience in the lab tend to do better than those who are complete novices.
So there hasn't really been much research that asks people to come back time and time again to see if you can actually improve their scoring over time.
So bringing them back day after day, that hasn't happened very much.
But there is some evidence that if a participant has previous experience of Gansvelt testing, for example, then they'll do slightly better than those who have no experience at all.
So that suggests that whatever this is creating the effect has some of the properties of a learned skill?
Well, I think there's no reason to think it wouldn't be like that, because I think if psychic ability exists, it's probably going to be similar psychologically to other abilities that we have, whether it be mathematical or musical or IQ even.
That we can, IQ is not a great example actually, because you can't really change your IQ.
But there is evidence that with practice you can get better at many things and that there's a natural distribution in the population.
So if we look at musical ability, there'll be some people who are geniuses and some people who are completely tone deaf.
And there are people who, if they take lessons, will learn to improve.
So I think it's certainly possible and you think it would be plausible that it would be possible for psychic ability to be improved as well over time.
Okay.
And presumably the results that you've had give you enough hope and promise and are interesting enough for you to want to continue.
Yes, I mean the Gansfeld research that we've done at Edinburgh, I recently did a study, it was actually a precognition study, which means that instead of having a sender in another room, precognition is about seeing the future.
And what we did was we asked our participant in the Gansfeld to give their impressions about the target they were going to see at the end of the session.
So, which sounds like an impossible task, but they were game, they were up for it.
So they were trying to, they were doing the judging in the usual way, looking at four different target possibilities and then ranking them and saying which one they thought was most similar to their own impressions.
And then once all their judgments had been recorded, at the end of the session, the computer randomly selected one of the four as the target.
And when we did that, we obtained significant results.
So we got, this is a study with 60 participants.
Each one did one session.
We got a 37% success rate in that.
And that was a significant result.
So meaning you wouldn't expect to get that very often just by chance.
And the nice thing about the precognition design is that it's very secure because the main worry when you're doing this kind of research where there's a sender is that there's information out there.
Somebody knows the answer.
So the sender Knows the answer, what the target is.
And the worry is that somehow, either through deliberate cheating or through some form of sensory leakage, that information about the target makes its way to the receiver and influences them while they're doing the judging.
So it's good to get positive results in a precognition design because that's not possible.
It's not possible for there to be any leakage of information about the target because you're trying to predict something that will happen randomly at a future point in time.
Exactly.
The target doesn't exist at the time the participant is doing the session.
So there's no way that information can leak.
And are the targets in any way obvious?
No, no.
We had 200 targets.
They were all different video clips.
And at each session, a new target was randomly selected.
And we had the decoy targets as usual.
So that's a nice method to use.
Funnily enough, although it's very secure, parapsychologists have typically not done this with the gunsvelt.
They've typically done the ESP kind of experiment where you've got a sender or an agent in another room.
And I think the reason for that is that that feels more natural.
It feels like kind of communication.
I suppose the responsibility is shared between you and the agent.
Whereas if it's a precognition experiment, maybe that's a bit more scary because you are looking in to the future and you are the only one who's going to see that target at the end of the day.
Of course, this suggests something very important, doesn't it?
That's just dawned on me.
But then, you know, I'm not a scientist.
I'm a bear with a very small brain.
But it's just dawned on me that this proves to us, or maybe goes along the way of proving to us, that the future already exists.
Well, I'd love to be a physicist.
I think this is where, this is essentially the theory of sign, of what is the mechanism?
How is it possible for us to get information about a future event?
Now, it may be that time kind of runs backwards and forwards in a kind of symmetrical way and that our sense of time progressing from the present into the future is kind of false.
I don't know.
I mean, you need to get a physicist on or an astrophysicist, perhaps, someone who is looking at time in a theoretical way and ask them, you know, would it be possible?
Are there ways in which our understanding of how the universe works and this is parallel universes we're talking about, I think.
Well, that's one possibility.
I think Professor Bernard Carr, I think he looks at multiple universes.
So he's an astrophysicist and he's interested in the paranormal.
I think he's interested in theories, physical theories for how this might be possible.
And he favors this multiple universe explanation.
I can't pretend to understand it, to be honest.
And yet your research is beginning to deliver information that might suggest that that exists.
You know, if these people have a higher than random possibility of divining the outcome of your experiment, half an hour or so before we know what the outcome is because it's picked at random, then something is happening.
There must be a knowledge or that future event, whatever the predictor comes up with, somewhere that already exists.
That's the challenge for the physicists is to explain that.
So when you get that bunch of results then, what do you do?
Do you take them round to the physics department, bang on the door and say, sorry to bother you guys, but have a look at this?
Well, I think it needs to be replicated.
As I said, the precognition method hasn't been used very often with the Gansveldt.
And there's still controversy, although I've said that the Gansvelt studies, both the telepathy ones and the precognition ones, have been going around for quite a long time, but there's still debate over how to interpret the findings.
I mean, the findings are mostly positive.
And I don't know if it's fair.
I think there's perhaps some scientific resistance, perhaps some assumption, although there must be something wrong with these experiments somewhere.
We're just not quite sure what it is yet.
But I think the parapsychologists are still working on creating a sort of body of studies that mainstream physicists will take seriously and will look at.
So for some, there's a bit of a knee-jerk reaction against it.
But at the same time, physicists, I think, are quite open-minded because they have some pretty incredible theories in their own discipline.
So they may be a little bit more open-minded than psychologists are about this.
So if I ask you the question now, what do you think is going on?
I'm presuming the answer that I will get is, I don't know.
That's right.
I don't know.
I don't count myself as a theoretician.
So I'm kind of at the coalface trying to generate the data.
And hopefully that will help to provide sort of kind of material for the theoretical researchers to get their teeth into to start to look for patterns and ideas for how this might work.
Part of my interest is in methodology.
I actually, because I'm not a physicist, I'm not really, I don't count myself as able to kind of come up with these sorts of explanations.
But I am interested in how to do good quality research.
And I think that parapsychology is quite a good vehicle for doing that because there's lots of ways you can make mistakes in this area.
So for example, with the telepathy study, if you have the sender looking at targets that are, let's say, postcards, and they've taken a postcard out of the envelope and they've looked at it, and then it goes back into an envelope and that package is Taken over to the receiver to do the judging,
it's possible that the sender has left some physical signs on the actual target that they were holding, you know, essentially greasy fingerprints.
We call it the greasy fingerprints hypothesis.
So there might be some subtle information that is communicated about the target accidentally because the sender was holding this postcard in their hands.
That's just one of the hundreds of thousands of different ways that things could go wrong.
And it's really quite a good workout to try to design these studies and to rule out sources of leakage or fault or error.
And that's one of the things I'm particularly interested in.
There is a problem with replication.
And I think when you use the term replication, you mean that different people doing the same sorts of research recording their results in different ways.
Yeah, it's really interesting, actually.
Well, parapsychologists have had this problem for a long time.
So they've always struggled to get consistent effects in their experiments.
And it's led them to think a lot about, you know, how to try to remove possible sources of bias.
For example, perhaps some researchers are more motivated and therefore you can't replicate them because you're not doing the research the same way that they did it because they were biased, for example.
And parapsychologists have been looking at this question for a long time.
And psychologists have only lately, just in the last five years or so, realized they've got the same sorts of problems and are starting to think of ways to deal with them.
So in a particular example, and actually it's a recent piece of research that I did with Professor Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire, we looked at what's called registered reports.
So this is a method that psychologists have devised to try to deal with the issue of researcher bias.
And what happens is that when you're planning a study and submitting it to, normally you conduct a study, then you write it up and then you submit it to a journal.
And the journal decides whether or not to accept it.
And often they reject a study because it's not significant.
So they think that's not interesting.
And sometimes the researcher themselves, if they don't get the results they wanted, they don't bother submitting the paper for publication.
Yeah, that means that you get a kind of the tip of the iceberg is being published and there's all sorts of stuff going on behind the scenes that we never find out about.
So the registered reports flips the model around.
It has the researchers who are planning a study submit the plan for the study to the journal and it's reviewed and the journal editors decide whether or not to accept it on the basis of the quality of the plan.
Is it meaningful?
Is it going to be well conducted?
And then that means that whether or not the study is published is not dependent on the outcome.
It's dependent on the plan that was submitted.
And that stops this, what we call the file drawer.
It's this decision not to submit something for publication, just to throw it in the file drawer if you didn't like the way your study turned out.
In other words, if you say you're going to do it, you're committed.
Well, it will become obvious if you don't do it, because you've already sent it into a panel of people and they basically logged it, they registered it.
Don't you still have a bias problem, though, because there are a group of people assessing the worth of the plan?
Well, there could be some bias in that process, but it won't be influenced by their knowledge of the result of the study, because at that point the data hasn't been collected yet.
So the bias tends to be more powerful when the answer is known as to whether or not the study was significant, whether it found positive results.
So if you didn't like the study getting positive results, you might be biased against it.
You'd work quite hard to find flaws with it.
So in this situation, you may have a bias, but you don't know how the study is going to turn out.
So you have to accept it on the planned method.
And it has the effect of essentially stopping researchers from burying unwanted results.
And in fact, there's one of the earliest evaluations of the effect of doing this kind of thing, of basically registering a study before you've conducted it, it was done in medical research.
So outside of psychology and outside of parapsychology.
It's honestly one of the scariest papers I've ever read.
So basically what they did, the researchers looked at a bunch of studies conducted in America looking at the effect of drugs and dietary supplements on cardiovascular disease.
And in this area, this is in the USA, in the year 2000, it was decided to make study registration mandatory.
So that meant that from 2000 onwards, the researchers who were doing these evaluations of the cardiovascular drugs had to state in advance what their methods were, what their analyses were going to be.
And so in this paper, there was a comparison of the studies conducted before 2000, essentially those that were susceptible to bias, and those conducted afterwards that had been pre-registered.
And what they found was that 57% of the studies that were published before 2000 got positive results.
They were reporting an effect of this intervention, whether it be a drug, on the health that was being measured.
So 57% were positive.
After pre-registration was introduced, that dropped to just 8%.
Oh, my God.
And by chance, you'd only expect 5%.
But to some people, that's going to sound like bad news in the field that you investigate, but it is actually good news, isn't it?
Well, it's good news because now in medical research as well as in psychology, researchers are starting to, they're now wise to this problem.
And pharmaceutical companies and funders, the funders want to make sure that the findings are reliable.
Pharmaceutical companies have got to go along with what the funders want to do.
So it's now becoming more mainstream to do this pre-registration.
Now what's interesting in parapsychology is that because we've been grappling with issues about replication forever, we actually introduced registered reports in the mid-1970s.
So there was a particular journal called the European Journal of Parapsychology and the editor, Martin Johnson, decided to introduce this style of article where you accept the submitted paper on the basis of the plan before the results have been conducted.
And so the study that I did with Richard Wiseman was to look at about 30 years of this journal, comparing the articles that were pre-registered and those that were reporting the results of the study that hadn't been pre-registered.
We were interested to see whether or not there was a difference in the success rate in the two groups, similar to what was done with the cardiovascular studies in the medical journal.
And we found the same kind of thing.
So we found that in the non-registered studies, 28% of the studies found significant results.
And that's much more than you'd expect by chance.
But in the registered studies, only 8% found significant results.
So it actually went down to a similar level as was found in the medical research.
But the 8% become more valid.
Pardon?
The 8% are more valid then, aren't they?
Yes, I mean, I think the argument is that these are better quality studies.
And so these are more reliable findings.
And these represent kind of reliable information rather than the tip of the iceberg, if you like, that you're only seeing the studies that have worked out and that have therefore been submitted for publication.
So I suppose what's interesting about this whole story is that although it's perhaps not such great news for parapsychology because it's a smaller effect than originally thought when you look at these registered studies, at the same time you can make the argument that actually parapsychologists are pioneers in methodological improvements.
So they're showing the way for other researchers, which now in 2013 psychologists started to do this.
Parapsychology has been doing it since the mid-1970s.
So there's some kind of positive news, if you like, for parapsychology here, saying that this is good quality research.
And so it's not easily dismissed.
It's not possible to say, oh, these are a bunch of amateurs who don't know how to do good research.
In fact, we're doing better research than some mainstream researchers.
But you then have to persuade people who provide funding and the rest of science that although the effects will reduce significantly, what you're left with is something that really could be potentially groundbreaking, earth-shaking.
That's right.
I mean, it doesn't have to be a big effect to be an important effect.
And so, for example, the studies looking at the effects of aspirin on heart attack, they're also very small effects.
But it was sufficiently important that, you know, aspirin is now routinely prescribed as a blood thinning agent that will help people to prevent them from having a heart attack.
So small effects are not necessarily unimportant effects.
And obviously, in parapsychology, if we do have small effects, they could still be of great theoretical importance because we don't understand how people could communicate psychically with one another or how people could influence physical objects through thought alone.
So we may need to change.
If these small but reliable effects persist, and it's a fairly, I think it's still early days, but if we can produce consistent evidence of a small but reliable effect, then that still needs to be explained.
And that might mean we have to adjust our understanding of consciousness, you know, what is possible.
Because at the moment, we tend to think of ourselves as sort of isolated islands, not that we're actually somehow overlapping with one another.
Well, that's interesting fuel for the future, I think.
On a completely different tangent, if I can just do this at the end of this, you are living in and working in what is reputed to be one of the most haunted and ghost-ridden cities in Europe, in the world, in fact.
And over the last few months, I've interviewed a few people who say that they've been to various parts of Edinburgh, particularly those that were affected historically by plague, and they have had the most chilling, scary, amazing experiences with entities.
Last night, I interviewed a woman who claimed that she had gone to a place where not only had they seen a physical presence of a person in front of them that seemed to be aware of them, but also one of the effects that she experienced or suffered, you could say, was that she actually felt the feeling of being punished by having something driven through her hand.
And her hand physically swelled up.
This was in Edinburgh.
This was your city.
Physically swelled up.
While she was in that particular location, when she moved away from it, the swelling went down.
Now, there are many questions I would have thought for a person like you to ask about this.
Some of them are to do whether such phenomena could possibly exist.
And there are many people who go there expecting to see it and experience It and they do.
And the other questions being around the psychology of the individuals who go.
You know, if you go on a ghost trip, then you want to see ghosts.
I suppose those two things are connected, really.
Aha, I mean, with Richard Wiseman again, actually, we did do some research in Edinburgh, we did in the underground vaults in Edinburgh, looking at ghostly experiences and whether they were clustered in certain locations, and then whether or not these clusters related to anything about the physical environment or the prior reports, if you like.
And we did actually find there was clustering.
So there were certain rooms or locations that people reported more frequently having experiences in.
And we tried to find something about what physical factors might be associated.
So we looked at electromagnetic activity and found some relationship between electromagnetic activity and strange experiences.
Some of the experiences were quite subtle.
It was like feeling uneasy, feeling cold suddenly.
So we didn't have many experiences like the one you've just described where someone really felt physically attacked, if you like.
But we did look at the question about whether or not it mattered if you had prior expectations as you went into the venue as to where things might happen.
And unexpectedly, we found no relationship between the prior knowledge of the location and where the clustering took place.
So when we took out those individuals, in other words, who had prior knowledge, so we only looked at those who were completely new to the locations, they still clustered in the same areas.
And so that actually, that's against the sceptical hypothesis, which is that you're going in there with expectations, therefore you have strange experiences.
So that's a very exciting finding, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, we didn't expect to find that, to be honest, because it is true that in general, we're very good at seeing shapes and hearing, making sense of jumbled noises.
And if we have particular expectations, then we, you know, for example, hearing your name in a crowded room, you know, our brain is very good at shaping a stimuli to make us hear or see what we're expecting to see.
So we, you know, that's what you would normally expect.
But when it comes to more complex experiences, maybe that breaks down.
If it's a fully formed, you know, body that you're seeing in front of you or you're feeling something that's unambiguous, then maybe you can't really plausibly say, oh, that's because you were only imagining it.
You were only expecting it.
I'm always fascinated to talk with the guides who work.
I live not very far from Hampton Court Palace.
It's walking distance from where I live, so I can go there often.
And, you know, in the off season in the winter, when it's not so busy, you know, I will sometimes talk to the guides there.
And some of those people have worked there for two decades or more.
And many of them will tell you the most hair-raising experiences that they've had where Henry VIII, various historical figures walk down corridors, and there's a chapel there where all kinds of manifestations appear.
The haunted gallery.
Well, the haunted gallery, exactly, the haunted gallery is literally haunted.
But, you know, the people who tell you these things, I get the impression that they're not just telling, you know, a story for a tourist because I'm a local.
I'm not easily impressed by these things in the way that a tourist would be.
I genuinely get the impression that those things happen there on a regular basis.
Absolutely.
And actually, in our experiments, and we did do one at Hampton Court as well.
So in both of these experiments, we got the guides to tell us where the reports were coming from.
So we built up our map, if you like, of possible hotspots, and then based on the reports from the guides.
And then we selected other areas as kind of control areas where there hadn't been so many reports.
And then we asked our participants to go to both sorts of areas.
And absolutely, the guides in Edinburgh, in the vaults, one of the guides said there were certain places that she just would not go into on her own because she'd had too many strange experiences.
It is astonishing, isn't it?
So I think the conclusion point that we come to here is that there is plenty for legitimate academic researchers to get their teeth into.
And there is more in heaven and earth, as they say, than we can see and touch and feel.
Definitely, definitely.
There's lots of work to be done.
I mean, the only sadness is that it's a relatively small field in terms of resources and person power.
So progress is relatively slow, not because there isn't anything interesting happening, but because there are not very many people actually doing the research.
Caroline, in the research you've done to date, and I'm sure the answer to this question will be different in a year from now and different again a year from that, what has surprised you?
What has been maybe the one thing that has surprised you, maybe shocked you most?
There's a question.
Oh, yeah, that's a good question.
What's made you raise your eyebrows more than they would normally be raised?
Yeah, yes, I don't know.
I mean, I did have an experience myself, sort of hearing footsteps when I was in, I think it was in Mary King's Close in Edinburgh.
And I wasn't doing an experiment there, but I was doing a kind of theatrical event there.
And I was on my own in a part of the underground close and heard footsteps.
And when I later went and spoke to the staff, thinking it was one of them, they said that none of them had been there.
So I guess I heard, possibly I heard a ghost, I don't know.
But it was certainly a bit spooky because I was in the dark at the time.
I was kind of hiding in a closet at the time.
So it was a scary experience, definitely a bit hair-raising.
Yeah, it certainly sounds like if you're hiding in a closet, that happens.
My goodness me.
the life of a parapsychologist, you see.
Well, it's rich and varied.
That's definitely true.
Okay, so what are you going to be working on in the you know, in the very close foreseeable future?
Are you continuing with the telepathy experiments?
Yes, what we're doing is planning.
I've actually got a new PhD student starting in September, and we're going to be following up on the Gansfeld studies with selected subjects.
I'm hoping to be working with creative or artistic participants.
We might be able to get some of them during Edinburgh Fringe, because obviously there's loads of artistic types in town.
And we're going to try to do telepathy experiments rather than precognition ones, but it is more challenging.
So I take a little bit of time to think out and think whether I can really do safe telepathy research where there's no possibility of leakage from the sender.
And you will remember perhaps, I certainly do, the days when people like David Frost on television would do great spectaculars where they would try to demonstrate some of these things on live television.
Do you think it will ever be possible to reliably demonstrate some of this for the mass public, not for scientists in cloistered environments?
Well, I think it is possible.
I think it would be possible.
But these are quite slow experiments to do normally.
So typically when you do something for the media, which I have done on occasion, what you're presenting the public with is not really a realistic depiction of what an experiment is like.
So you're kind of changing it in the process of making it into a public event.
And often all of your precautions go out the window because you can't keep the sender, you know, for example, the TV crew wants to film the sender.
So suddenly you've got 10 people who know what the target is.
So it becomes very difficult to do a genuine, well-controlled study as soon as it becomes part of a public demonstration.
But I am hopeful that with systematic research we can find a way to improve the effect, the size of the effect in these studies and the reliability of the work.
I think you've got one of the most desirable jobs in this country.
I'm very lucky.
For sure.
You didn't, I don't think, last time we spoke have your own website.
Is there a Caroline Watt website these days for keeping the lookout?
Well there's a Kerstler Parapsychology Unit website.
So if you just Google Kerstler, that's K-O-E-S-T-L-E-R, then you'll probably find us that way.
And so we have a website and also I run an online course.
So I'm halfway through that at the moment.
So if anyone is interested in finding out more, then they'll get information about that on our website.
Caroline, lovely to speak with you again, and I'm sure we will catch up in the future.
If anything radical happens, please put me on your list of media contacts.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
It's lovely to speak to you.
You too, Caroline.
Thank you so much for making time for me.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
Caroline Watt, who's at the groundbreaking cutting edge, if those are not mixed metaphors, of research, into all things parapsychological.
What a great job to have.
And we'll hear more from Caroline in the future as her work continues and develops.
Thank you very much for all of your feedback and support for this show.
13 years we've been doing it now, more than 400 editions.
And still, I hope, going strong.
I hope your summer, whether your northern hemisphere or southern hemisphere, or it's actually winter, is going well.
I hope everything is going well in your life.
Please keep in touch.
Send me an email through theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link.
You know how to do that.
And when you get in touch, said it at the beginning, I'll say it at the end.
Tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
I'm going to shut up and go away now.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, stay in touch.
And keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars, as Casey Gasem used to say.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection