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Dec. 12, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
59:14
Edition 686 - Dr Neil Dagnall
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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.
Well, here we are, slap bang, dash in the middle of December.
I say in the middle of December.
We're at the beginning of December, but we're staring down the barrel of the middle of December, if you know what I'm saying.
And the weather forecasters are telling us how cold it's going to get.
We've already had a taste of that in the south of England.
I know that if you're in the north of Scotland, you're going to get a darn sight more of it.
And I think the cold is okay, as long as there's a little bit of sunshine with it.
At the moment, we've had about a week of grey skies here, and it really depresses the hell out of me to look out of the window, and it's grey, and it's damp, and you can't turn the heating on because of the cost of it.
You know that feeling.
It's awful.
But as I'm recording this at the moment, I'm looking at an absolutely clear blue sky, and the sun is pouring in, and that's warming things up.
And that's how winter should be, isn't it?
I don't know.
Weather talk.
Hope everything is okay with you.
Thank you very much for all of the emails.
Please keep those coming in.
Remember, if your email requires a response, then please put reply required at the top of the email.
Then I will know.
And I get to see each and every email as it comes in and thank you for them.
You can go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the email link, and you can send me an email from there.
And if you'd like to make a donation to allow for the continued smooth running of the unexplained, then you can also do that at my website, theunexplained.tv, which was devised and created by Adam.
And thank you to Adam for his work on the show.
And if you have made a donation to The Unexplained recently, anytime during 2022, thank you very, very much.
You know who you are.
Just a couple of quick shout-outs.
Emily, a lawyer in Virginia, USA, got your email today as I record this.
Nice to hear from you, Emily.
Thank you very much for the nice things that you said.
Same thing for Jason in France.
Nice to hear from you.
And Sean in Bromborough, which is just across the water, as we say, from where I was born in Crosby, Liverpool.
And looking across to the Widdle, I think you can see Bromborough from there, just about.
You were going to tell me I'm wrong, Sean, now.
But thank you very much.
It's really nice to hear from you.
And I hope that you're getting by.
And I hope that one way or another you're looking forward to the little bit of peace in this crazy world that Christmas might afford to you.
You know, I'm simply going to turn off for a little.
The TV show is not going to be on on Christmas Day because I think they're doing other things then.
And, you know, I'm just going to try to forget stuff and try to think ahead to the future in those couple of days if I possibly can.
What kind of year has 2022 been?
It's been good in many ways.
There have been one or two little potholes on the road, but, you know, we have to get through those.
And that's, I guess, the human condition.
That's part of life, isn't it?
I hope that things have been more or less okay for you.
And if they haven't, remember here at The Unexplained, we're a great big family.
And we can all pull together in times of crisis, don't you find?
Okay, the guest on this edition, somebody very different, an academic researcher who looks into parapsychology, the paranormal in general, Neil Dagnell, who works a lot with a man called Ken Drinkwater.
They're both at Manchester Metropolitan University, which is kind of on Oxford Road in Manchester, near where the old BBC building used to be, back in the day.
So Neil Dagnell has written many academic papers, done many sessions, been involved in some books.
I'm going to be speaking with him on this edition of The Unexplained.
So something very different, talking about quantitative academic research into the paranormal.
So something different.
Thank you again for all of your emails.
Please keep them coming.
Remember, the cardinal rule, when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
All right, let's get to the guest in Manchester now, Neil Dagnall from Manchester Metropolitan University.
Neil, thank you for making time for me.
How are you?
I'm fine, thank you.
Now, this is a really interesting thing that you are doing, and I'm fascinated by anybody who decides to do this kind of research in an academic way.
Why are you doing this?
It's quite a long story, actually.
I mean, first of all, I was always very interested in the anomalous and the paranormal.
So going back to the days of school, and I'm talking primary school here, I can remember the teachers talking about the Amateurville.
So if you remember when the Amateurville horror came out and the book, for some reason at primary school, my teachers were quite animated and engaged with that topic.
So I was interested in it.
And then, of course, that sort of theme followed through things like Marvel Comics, documentaries, because in those days we had the emergence of Yuri Geller on TV and people were interested in the paranormal, shows like Kreskin as well.
So there was that very heavy background.
And then sort of fortuitously, at the university that I work, they ran a parapsychology course as was.
And I wasn't teaching on the course at the time.
But I always thought, well, that's interesting.
And it's an odd thing for a university to offer.
And one of the members of staff left.
So I had the opportunity to jump into the breach and do some teaching on it.
And then the other member of staff left.
And I ended up being unit leader.
And we went from having 20, 30 students initially, or some years it didn't even run, to it being the largest unit in the third year for a brief period.
So we had over 100 students.
So really it was from getting interested in the paranormal, having the opportunity to teach it.
And then what I found out was at the time, and this was pre-internet, so it rather dates me a little bit, around 2000, there wasn't a host of resources.
So now if you want to know about the paranormal, there's lots of internet blogs, there's lots of sites, there's lots of people who have written books.
But at that time, there wasn't a lot of empirical research.
There were a few journals that carried papers by people like James Horan, Rentz Lang, Michael Persinger.
They were quite famous.
Richard Wiseman, of course, and Chris French were doing some articles, but there wasn't a lot of research.
So, as the course bobbed along, what we decided to do was we decided to do demonstrations.
And from those demonstrations, that's when we started doing the proper research, if you like.
When you say demonstrations, do you mean we got a medium in and we asked them to communicate with Uncle Fred?
That was later.
In the early days, it was just replicating the sorts of experimental things they'd done.
So the very first study we did, it doesn't sound very exciting, but what it was was there'd been a large body of research that had suggested that people who believe in the paranormal show specific sorts of judgment mistakes.
So, for example, they tend to see patterns in random stimuli.
So we presented them with different sorts of problems and we saw, oh, which one best predicted belief in the paranormal?
And that was the first paper that we had published in this area.
So the whole idea, and I know that that's pervaded all of your work, hasn't it really?
The thought that perhaps some people are more predisposed to believing in these things and to being part of these things than other people.
That's not to diss those people.
That's just to establish whether that is a fact.
Yes.
I mean, openness.
I mean, I prefer to see it as being a positive thing rather than a negative thing because I think of myself as being a little too blinkered.
So it's being open to, you know, the possibility that things outside of conventional science do exist.
So I think that, you know, that's an important part of it.
Yes.
Are you a debunker?
Oh, definitely not.
No.
I'm glad you've asked that question.
Much of my research isn't about whether the paranormal exists or doesn't exist.
It's just about the factors that are associated with belief.
So we do test and construct models where we look at the sorts of psychological variables that are associated with experience of and belief in the paranormal.
Okay.
I get a lot of emails from people and I've had my own experiences too, but it's nice that people want to share with me now at this stage of doing this.
And I've been doing the podcast for nearly 17 years now and the TV show for nearly seven years.
So I've been around for a while.
People want to open up to me and tell me their stories.
And of the many stories that I've had in within the last month, there was one that I got in that I did on the TV show when we were unable to connect to a guest.
So I had to put something in that time.
And I put this story in.
And it was a story from a guy in the southeast of England.
I think probably happened when he was a little younger.
But he told me this story, and I've heard stories like this before, that he had been, I think, coming home and he was going to his parents' or his family's house and had seen in the neighboring garden, the next door neighbor, a man called Cyril, and had waved to him in the usual way, and I think Cyril had acknowledged him but not spoken.
And, you know, that seemed to be on the face of it, unusual only for the fact that I don't think Cyril particularly acknowledged him.
But there he was, large as life, you know, exactly as he'd always been, Cyril.
I don't know Cyril, but apparently he was.
And the emailer went back into the home and said, I've just seen Cyril in the garden.
And they told him that he died the day before.
Now, how would you, if you wanted to, interrogate a story like that?
I think it's difficult because, as you well know, there's different sorts of approaches to the study of the paranormal.
You know, you've got your parapsychologists who start from the premise that the paranormal exists, it's a possibility, and they want to explore it in a number of ways, usually using quantitative research, but they could use interviews.
There's anomalous psychologists, people who are out to, as you said before, not necessarily debunk, but will use standard psychological explanations to explain why this occurred.
And then there's people who sort of sit in the middle where I would be more interested in, rather than trying to debunk it or explain it, I'd be interested in the phenomenological experiences associated with that.
So whilst I'm not particularly a qualitative researcher, it would be really interesting to look at the impact that it had on that individual and also to consider the circumstances in which it arose.
So the phenomena itself is more interesting than actually trying to prove or disprove that it occurred, if that makes sense.
It does.
And do you find that people who claim that they've had experiences, like the one we've just heard about or any other experience, do you find that they're changed in any way?
You talked about the phenomenological, you might have trouble saying that word, phenomenological impact of the experience.
Do you find that people tend to be changed beyond just mere surprise by what happens to them?
Yeah, well, in some cases, they can be, I mean, we've done quite a few interviews with people.
We've only published a couple of studies because, as I say, qualitative isn't really an area where we have any great expertise.
We just like to play with it from time to time.
And what you tend to find is it has a great impact on the individual.
Now, in the case of, let's say, a family member who's passed over, it can give them reassurance to think that they're still in communication with them.
It can give them resolution.
It can provide some meaning in life.
Now, that's not with all paranormal experiences because there'll be a small minority of them where they cause people anxiety and discomfort, but generally they can be quite reassuring.
Right.
You've done a lot of research into those who believe, and I hear from a lot of people who devoutly believe.
I am tending, obviously, because I'm doing this show, I tend towards the belief, plus I had my own ghost experience, and I wasn't in any way predisposed to having one.
In fact, I was very busy on that particular night.
But, you know, I saw a three-dimensional person who disappeared in front of me while I was in a working situation.
So that was interesting.
I'm inclined towards it.
But, you know, what sorts of people, I guess, we're asking, and this is your core research, isn't it, are more predisposed to believing?
Well, that's quite an interesting question.
Again, because we got some research money to look at paranormal belief and experience.
And within psychology and parapsychology, the methods that have been used for assessing belief and experience have been quite limited.
There's a couple of scales that are used, for example.
One is the Australian sheep goat scale, which looks at PSI, which is things like telepathy, ESP, life after death, and psychokinesis.
So it's quite narrow.
Other people use the revised paranormal belief scale, which is broader and has seven different facets of paranormal belief.
But even in terms of looking at experiences alone and belief, they're quite narrow because what you're basically saying is you're saying that all believers are the same.
And what we've started to move towards is more interactive models where we're combining belief and experience with cognitive perceptual variables, such as one of them, schizotypy.
Now, schizotypy, some people would refer to as an attenuated form of schizophrenia, but we don't view it that way.
We look at it in a personality framework where you show some of the characteristics that would be associated with schizophrenia, but in a very attenuated form.
So, for example, you might be more creative, your thinking may be more spontaneous, it may be less bounded.
And what you tend to find is that people who score high on the cognitive perceptual facet of schizotypy, so they've got a lot of cognitions and ideation going on.
If they're high in belief, then they have a worldview or if you like, an interpretive lens with which to slot experiences in.
So you then get that reinforcing idea.
They believe, they look for experiences, they have lots of experiences, and they fit them in to that framework.
So that's one of the ideas that we've put forward.
And those people, do you find that phenomena are attracted to them or they are attracted to phenomena, if you see what I mean?
Does it mean that those people are simply an open channel, an open portal to things that are there and we don't understand, or they're creating things that they don't understand?
I think it could be a bit of both.
I think it's a reciprocal process.
Well, that's interesting.
So there may be some people, and I don't want to particularly latch onto this one aspect, but it's interesting, isn't it?
There may be some people whose doors are open to stuff, even if they don't necessarily know it.
Yeah, I think that's a fair summation.
Yeah.
I think, I mean, we did a few years ago with Harvey Irwin, who was a prolific researcher.
He's now retired, Australian chap, and his work was partly clinical and parapsychological.
So he would take the sorts of variables we've just talked about and combine them and look at them.
And one of the things Harvey did was he came up with the survey of anomalous experiences.
And it's not a new idea, but it's just a scale that you can give to people.
And part of it assesses whether you're open to noticing anomalies.
Because imagine we went into a haunted house.
There's lots of things going on in there.
But if I'm quite closed in my perception, I'm not going to notice anything regardless.
So some people are prone to noticing.
They're more sensitive to the environment.
And the second part of the scale is, are they then going to attribute that to paranormal causation?
So it's that interaction between, first of all, noticing something and then secondly, labeling it and attributing it to paranormal causes.
That's, again, I'm saying that's interesting because it is.
In a situation like that, how do people make that connection, the knowing something and attributing it to a paranormal connection?
You know, some people can have experiences, can't they?
And will dismiss them.
And other people will want to investigate them.
They'll want to email people like me.
They'll want to really have a deep dive into them.
Well, another factor that correlates quite highly with belief in the paranormal is trying to resolve uncertainty.
So again, it's that thing about, am I going to be content with the idea I've seen something, I felt something, something's unusual?
Am I sanguine with going, okay, well, fine, I don't know what it was, let's leave it.
Or do you want solutions?
And then if you, you know, then you start looking for solutions, then you start to look at frames of reference.
I mean, one of the things we found when we interviewed mediums and psychics about their formative experiences was, of course, that they had people in the family.
So they had a long family tradition of people.
So it's drawing upon those cultural and experiential factors that give people this framework in which to interpret their experiences.
When you've done research, and you mentioned this into mediums and psychics, do you find that they are, in the main, open and willing to allow you in?
I suppose if you have a connection with those people, they must be.
But do you find it easy doing that research?
Generally speaking, yeah.
I mean, one of the great things about the community, if you like, and that includes lay people and interested enthusiasts together with academics, is that people are generally quite open.
I mean, obviously, from time to time, they'll be worried that you're just trying to debunk their research.
But once you reassure them that you're just interested in the sorts of experiences they're having, and, okay, as a psychologist, you may put forward some explanations that draw upon scientific or pseudoscientific, if you're not a fan of psychologists, theories.
Then they're okay with that.
Generally speaking.
Thinking about the specific research that you've done, can you think of anybody that you've researched who appeared to have more ability than perhaps others?
Look, I had a long period, I've talked about it in my life when I was much younger, when I used to psychic shop, a medium shop, and go to these people looking for specific information and often coming away disappointed and sometimes coming away gobsmacked.
Not that often, but it did happen.
I'm wondering if my experience parallels yours.
Well, as I said earlier, we've not really tested people in the same way because you'll have had people like Chris French on and Chris French will have done studies where he's tested people to see whether they score above chance on various.
We've not really done that sort of research.
We've been more interested in looking at their experiences, looking at how experience correlates with belief, how that interacts with personality factors.
So we've not really tested people per se.
There are, of course, when you look at the literature, some remarkable stories that are quite impressive.
I work with a colleague who quite recently looked at some of the early data on remote viewing because he got privileged access to some of the people that had done that research.
And because he's a statistician, he did some reanalysis and he found potentially some interesting effects there.
And it was sent off to quite a prestigious journal.
And as you can imagine what the feedback was, because what they did was they sent it out to several reviewers.
One was somebody who believed in the paranormal.
One was somebody who didn't believe.
And somebody was in the middle, if you like.
So of course, the believer loved it.
The skeptic hated it.
And the person in the middle thought with a few changes, it could be published.
I mean, that's the problem, though, isn't it?
How do you ever get beyond that?
Because a lot of it depends, and that's the core of your research, on what people believe.
I think that there is such a thing as remote viewing.
I don't know what it is, but that's just my opinion.
So whenever I look at the subject, I'm going to be colored in the way that I comment upon it and investigate it by that thought that it probably is something.
I just don't know exactly what it is.
And I wonder if anybody does.
I mean, that's the crux of it, isn't it?
Yeah, and that would be my standard point.
If you look at the evidence for some of the empirical trials and some of the meta-analyses of studies that have looked at things like remote viewing and ESP, there is some evidence there for it.
Now, whether that evidence is indicative of paranormal forces or represents something else, that's open to interpretation.
You've looked extensively into the sorts of people who have, for example, ghost experiences.
Now, I'd never had a ghost experience.
My father had.
He was in the police in Liverpool and goes with the territory that he was in unusual places at unusual times.
So he did have things that we would call paranormal experiences.
I didn't.
I was interested and I, you know, I was doing this podcast, but I'd never had them.
And I didn't go around thinking, oh, I wish I had a ghost experience, or I wish the aliens would come and knock on my front door, you know, next Tuesday week.
I don't see things that way.
But when I had my ghost experience, I was doing something else.
I was filling in for a broadcaster in Liverpool called Pete Price, who's very famous up there.
I was doing his late night show.
Probably, is it eight years ago now, nine years ago?
It's probably nine.
Well, next year, it's nine years, yeah.
And I was busy, and I was working in the big tower in Liverpool, and it got to midnight, I think, maybe one o'clock in the morning.
Had to take a loo break going upstairs in the tower.
Nobody else in there apart from my producer who was in the control room.
And I came down the spiral staircase, walked to the corridor, which runs all the way round the outside of that tower with incredible views.
And I am not thinking about anything.
There is nothing in my mind.
And there wouldn't have been anything in my mind apart from sitting down in front of the microphone again and picking up after the news.
And that was the only thing that was even remotely in my mind.
I was very chilled.
I had not imbibed any alcoholic beverages at any time during that week.
There was nothing special about me or about the occasion.
But I saw in front of me a 1960s style building watchman with a tweedy kind of three-quarter length coat and some shiny black boots and a cap on his head, a very short guy, very, you know, very short and very, you know, thin.
Yeah, he wasn't well built at all.
And he looked at me, and just as I'm about to open my mouth and say, well, hello, I didn't know there was anybody else in here, he vanished in front of my eyes.
Now, your research would take a look at me and ask what it is about me that predisposes me to have an experience like that.
I can't honestly think that I have a conscious, rational answer to why that happened to me, but I can tell you that I wasn't programming for it.
I didn't want it.
It was nowhere in my mind.
Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting experience.
I mean, I myself haven't had anything similar to that.
It's difficult because unfortunately, by its very nature of doing quantitative research, as I said before, when we do qualitative research, we can start to focus on individual cases.
So generally speaking, we will look at large numbers of participants to see what sorts of patterns are associated.
So, a few years ago, I had a master's student who wanted to do something on electronic voice phenomena.
And what we did was we constructed an experiment which was based on the White Christmas paradigm.
And the White Christmas paradigm is the fact that if you put people in a room and you suggest to them that the song White Christmas, the famous one by Bing Crosby, is going to be played, many people, a large percentage of people, will, once you leave them on their own in the room for a while, will claim they've heard the song playing.
Okay.
You mean without, what, that they've heard it just in the atmosphere?
It wasn't played, but they've heard it.
You know, they will say that they've heard it.
And that's because people are more prone to, if you like, shifts in consciousness, everyday hallucinations.
I'm not saying yours was, by the way, Howard, but when you compare groups of people, what you find is that people who believe in the paranormal and people who have experience of the paranormal, they are more prone to hear voices in noise.
And that's what we did with her experiment.
We took the White Christmas paradigm and applied it to a scenario where we got people to sit in a room for five minutes.
They were listening to something that had allegedly been recorded in a, you know, in a haunted, in a haunted house.
And we asked them to indicate when they thought they heard messages and sounds within the noise.
And the noise was just static noise.
It was just a fizz and what we found, of course, was that people who believed in the paranormal, they had more productive type experiences and scored higher on things like schizotypy and proneness to hallucinations.
But as I said before, that doesn't, I'm not suggesting that these experiences are fabricated.
I'm just saying that they have, you know, the consciousness is less bounded and less fixed.
Right.
And so they might have been reaching into that white noise, whatever they were hearing, and imagining that they heard white Christmas.
Or they might have been somehow creating white Christmas within the white noise.
We can't know, can we?
Well, we know it wasn't played.
So therefore, in that instance, we can infer that it's something they've imagined.
Because obviously, if it was played, other people would have heard it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I've said obviously, but one would assume.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it draws on the idea of the difference between imagining and it actually occurring.
I don't know if you've ever come across it.
There was some interesting research done quite some time ago with the crashing memory paradigm.
And the crashing memory paradigm basically is just the idea that if we have a news, so let's say there's a piece of news footage where somebody has caught the aftermath of a crash of a plane.
So a plane has crashed at an airport.
And then we ask people about what they've seen afterwards.
They go beyond what they could have seen because being primed by seeing a little bit of the aftermath of an air crash will enable them to imagine all the associated scenarios because they've seen films, they've seen other air crashes.
So it's quite easy for them to move beyond that material and have this quite elaborate embellished account.
And in order to be able to discern the true memory, the accurate memory, they have to be able to make the distinction between what was imagined and what they saw.
And people often conflate those two so that they can't tell the difference between what was imagined and what they actually did see.
In terms of something that affects or seemingly affects a large number of people, there is this thing, and I'm sure you know all about it, the Mandela effect.
People who have a different memory of Nelson Mandela other than the one of him being released from his incarceration on Robin Island off Cape Town.
They have a memory of him dying in prison.
There are people who have a memory of a kids' TV program, a real clear memory of a kids' TV program that, according to the history that we all know, never existed.
Now, thousands upon thousands of people have these recollections or think they have these recollections of stuff that never happened.
Now that's a mass phenomenon.
That's something that's quantitative.
How do we begin to understand?
I'm not going to say explain, but how do we begin to understand that?
Again, it's quite difficult with the Mandela effect because there can be a number of different reasons for why people misremember things.
I mean, one of the I myself was struck by the Mandela effect beyond the, you know, it becoming famous.
I'm sure we all have been intuitively, where you think that some famous actor or actress has passed away, only to suddenly be presented with the fact it's, you know, their 100th birthday and you go, oh, gosh, I thought that person passed away years before.
So in those sorts of circumstances, it can be because somebody who was associated with them or closely associated with them or somebody who was allied to them in something they did, where you're again, making, you're drawing on that inference and forming that mistaken memory.
In modern society, it's more difficult because we're faced With lots and lots of information, and whether we check the accuracy of that information or not, I don't know.
I mean, one thing that struck me was it was late at night, and I was just checking into the Paranormal Society Facebook page, and I noticed that somebody had posted something about a famous actor dying.
And at the time, this actor had a bit of renaissance.
So I thought, gosh, that's shocking.
That's absolutely shocking.
And this actor is a local actor as well.
They're from Manchester originally.
So I thought, oh, gosh, they've just got this new TV show out.
They don't seem that old.
And it was only when I checked that I found it was just one of these spam stories.
And again, in modern society, with all the media, we don't have time to check the authenticity of information.
So that also contributes to the Mandela effect.
And that plays into the whole notion of the question of what is reality and what is truth.
A lot of people talk a lot about truth these days, especially politically.
And one person's version of the truth is not necessarily, as we've discovered with various governmental happenings, it's not necessarily another person's.
But if people can misremember or be absolutely certain that something happened before its time or never happened at all, but they were sure that it did happen, then how can we say that there is any such thing as truth or reality?
Well, I mean, that again is one of the variables that we've become quite interested in is the degrees to which people test the veracity of their thoughts.
A few years ago, I hit on, because Ken Drinkwater, my colleague, went to a conference in Portugal by the BL Foundation where each year people are invited to give talks about their projects.
And he'd met Seymour Epstein.
Now, Seymour Epstein had a model of a dual process model of thinking where you have experiential thinking and you have more objective thinking, you have rational thinking.
And what you tend to find is that experiential thinking, so basing your view of the world on how you think it is, on your experiences, on things that have happened to you, how you think it is.
That, again, can be associated with deficits in reality testing.
So that's the degree to which you rigorously test your thoughts.
And again, if we just make very quick judgments, we're drawing on our subjective worldview, then we're more likely to deviate from what is the prevailing sense of reality than if we sit there pondering.
But of course, we're all too busy to sit there pondering all the time.
So it's not just a case of using one of those types of thoughts.
We use them interchangeably.
Do you think that in the years that you've been doing this research, and I know that you've been interested in these things for as long as I have by the sounds of it, do you think you've got nearer to understanding how people come to believe the things that they believe?
Do you think that you're further down that road or is your research opening up more questions than it's opening up answers?
I think that's a wonderful question.
It's the latter, actually, because the more you engage with it, the more interested you become and the more you try and advance the methodology.
So as I said before, rather than just looking at belief in isolation or experience in isolation, it's good to start viewing believers as having different profiles.
So they're not believing in the paranormal, they're not homogenous, a single group.
They're actually a series of subgroups that are influenced by other personality factors.
And that's a much more dynamic way of viewing belief.
You've done a lot of work on conspiracy theories.
They're, of course, a hot-button topic right now for a whole ton of reasons.
And if we do happen to mention any topics in this part of the discussion, I would be grateful if those who propound whatever theory it might be for something or against it, please don't contact me about those things because I'm not having those specific debates here.
And, you know, you know what, the sorts of things I'm talking about.
But there are a raft of conspiracy theories out there.
You know, everything from QAnon right on down.
And people believe them in their millions around the world.
And they almost reinforce themselves.
Are we, because of social media, maybe because of other factors that you might know about and I don't, are we more pliable?
Are we more, as a human race?
Are we more susceptible to being manipulated, to having false notions, to having conspiracy theories implanted within us and believing them?
I don't think it's necessarily having an increased propensity to.
I think it's just that we're overloaded with information in modern society because the internet is something we use constantly.
You know, we get emails, we check social media, we go on the internet for news, et cetera, et cetera.
So in the past, we were heavily reliant on the traditional media, like, for example, radio and newspaper.
So there's just this flood of continuous information.
So it makes it very difficult to check, if you like, the veracity and the authenticity of it.
And also, you know, sharing interesting stories and having a distrust of government, they're common human factors.
I think, you know, they will have been there since the beginning of news.
So I think it's that combination, you know, the fact that gossiping, sharing a little bit of something Together with it being interesting, those sorts of factors make conspiracies of great interest to people and they stimulate their interest.
They're more available.
They're able to draw upon them.
And also, as we said before, when governments perform less than well, then that breeds political cynicism and it creates an environment where conspiracy theories can thrive.
So it's not just anything to do with our propensity to believe.
It's maybe we just have the circumstances plus social media, electronic media, and sources of information that we never had before.
That's all it is.
We're being human beings when those things happen.
Yeah, I think, again, that's a great synopsis.
Yeah, I mean, when you think about conspiracies, the thing about the conspiracy is not that it's wrong to be critical of an official account, because often official accounts, for whatever reason, can be deficient in some way.
They might not explain things fully.
There may be gaps in the logic.
So it's a good thing to engage in critical evaluation of those accounts.
Where it becomes problematic is where that doubt acts as a springboard for endorsing another idea that you don't logically, rationally evaluate.
And could that be the mechanism behind which seemingly millions of people believed a well-known conspiracy broadcaster when he claimed that a school shooting, the Sandy Hook massacre, effectively never happened, never happened in the way that we were told it happened, never happened.
And of course, that had caught consequences for Alex Jones and he's filed for bankruptcy in the last few days and all the rest of it.
But nevertheless, he went on air, he kept saying that, and a lot of his followers and others believed him.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you can overgeneralize, can't you?
So, for example, if we can find instances where we believe the government or figures of authority have not told us things that are accurate, we can then overgeneralize that to being true of all information.
And that's where the flaw in the logic comes from, because just because in one instance we've been misled or the information hasn't been accurate doesn't mean that's the case in all instances.
So how do we get around that problem then?
I know that there are countries, and I've debated this on this show before, there are countries in this world who are actively looking into teaching children at school more about how you deduce whether something that you're reading, whether something that you're seeing, whether something somebody's told you, something that you got off social media, how you judge whether that is correct or not.
Now, I was never taught that kind of critical thinking.
I think it was meant to emerge from my university education.
And I think it my training as a journalist.
And I think it did.
But, you know, a lot of people don't get that education, and they don't get the journalistic training, so they don't have that experience.
Plus, as you said, we're all overfaced with information right now.
You know, the difficulty is in how you not necessarily stop conspiracy theories, because we're always going to have them, but you get people to think more clearly about them, isn't it?
Yeah, I mean, one, obviously, is to make people aware of the dangers of false information and of jumping to conspiracy theories for which there's no foundation.
So you can have preemptive messages.
And then you can then couple that with encouraging people to think critically.
And we put together a research bidder a couple of years ago, which got past the first stage, but unfortunately wasn't funded in the second stage, which was a shame, because it was very much what you just suggested, where we would go to schools and develop a package that would encourage them, A, to be aware, and B, to engage in critical evaluation of messages that they've received.
I want to go back to the hauntings and the ghosts and all the rest of it, because one thing that from the reading that I did about you and your work is that you've looked into a thing that I've only touched on in these shows before, haunted people syndrome.
Now, what is it and how can you research that?
Again, you can look at whether people typically have experiences or not.
So are there some people who have multiple experiences?
Do they recount many, many different paranormal experiences where ghosts will follow them for sustained periods of time?
So if you like, the idea is that some people feel as if ghosts have attached themselves to them quite strongly.
And also they're people who are likely to have regular sorts of experiences.
And again, you can look at that in terms of consciousness and in terms of the sorts of experiences they have.
You can look at the consciousness in terms of variables like transliminality.
And transliminality is a factor that was developed by Michael Thalbourne, who unfortunately passed away a number of years ago.
And James Horan and Renz Lang have done quite a bit of work on it.
And in short, transliminality is about how thick or permeable your sensory boundaries are.
So some people, they have very thin boundaries, which means they're more open to experiences because they're taking in a range of stimulation, both internal and external.
And those sorts of factors will be associated with haunted people.
I'm reading a definition here on Wikipedia, admittedly, about transliminality, defined as hypersensitivity to psychological material, imagery, ideation, effect, and perception originating in the unconscious, principally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, as I say, the sort of very basic definition is just about having permeable boundaries.
So there's lots of cognitive, perceptual, environmental, sensory experiences going on, and they're flowing in and out of people.
You know, I did a cruise for Morella Cruises, an unexplained cruise, a month or so ago.
And it was great.
We had some terrific guests on there.
I had a medium Claire Broad, but also there was the former science editor, space editor of the BBC, Dr. David Whitehouse.
We had all aspects of science and the paranormal represented.
And the vast majority of people who were on that ship, some of them were booked specifically for that event, but there were many, many people on board who had just booked a cruise and didn't know we were doing those shows.
And they turned up in great numbers, I'm pleased to say, and enjoyed what they were seeing and hearing and took away something useful from it.
But I came across one person, and there must have been a few of them, who said, no, I'm just not, I don't want to know anything about any of that.
You know, aliens, ghosts, it's all, you know, no, it's not my thing.
Sorry, we came to what we're not my thing.
Now, that was very much the minority, and those sessions were successful beyond my wildest dreams.
But the point that I'm coming to here is that do you think that there are always going to be people who will be open to it all?
And there will be people who, in spite of what happens to them, what they read about, what their friends tell them, what happens to their husband or wife, they're never going to believe that there is anything beyond what we can see, smell, feel, touch, and hear?
I think it often depends on how you frame the, it depends on the situation and how you frame the question.
So if we start off with the premise, have you had a paranormal experience?
Do you believe in the paranormal?
Many people will immediately say, no.
But then they will say to you, I'm sorry, I'm jumping in here.
I shouldn't do this.
But quite often I found them they say, mind you.
Exactly, Howard.
No, that was exactly what I was going to say.
Is then you find out that, yes, they have had something unusual happen.
They're not quite sure whether it's paranormal or not, but they're open to the idea it may have been.
And not only will they have had single experiences, they'll have had multiple experiences.
So, you know, there'll be several instances where they're, oh, well, this happened.
And actually, now I think about it, that also happened.
So I think it depends on the situation and the way that you frame the question, because I think most people have had unusual experiences.
Now, ghosts is run-of-the-mill tabloid newspaper stuff.
It's in the newspapers all the time.
Less so are those people, and there is a whole country of them who believe that they have seen so-called cryptozoological creatures, wolf men, dog men, Bigfoot, whatever.
And there are people in the United Kingdom who firmly hold the view and do research on that.
Is that something that's ever been in your purview?
Not really.
I mean, I did do, I got contacted by a paper in the Northeast many years ago, and they told me this account of a big cat.
And I pointed out that it was highly unlikely, only then to receive an email from a chap that wrote books about big cats in the Northeast to tell me that they did exist.
To which, you know, I then said, well, I've not seen any evidence to that effect.
So to reframe that, I'm quite open to the idea that there are things that we have yet to discover.
I mean, one of the things about science is people think that science indicates what is true.
It only indicates what's likely to be true very often.
And new discoveries are made constantly.
So cryptozoology depends on what we're talking about.
If we're talking about big cats roaming around the back streets of Manchester, I'm more sceptical.
But if we're talking about creatures that were thought to be extinct or creatures that have yet to be discovered, much more open.
That's a very important point, I think, Neil, that our perceptions, our understanding, not perceptions, our understanding of things changes all the time.
People think that scientific belief is fixed.
Of course it isn't.
Things that we believe today, we may not believe tomorrow, and we may be able to discover a whole batch of things that we couldn't even have envisioned.
Just look at space research.
How much more we know today than we did 10 years ago.
So if you want to apply that to the scientific study of the paranormal, we're going to understand it a great deal more 10 years from now, and we'll probably have an awful lot more information on which to base our conclusions.
Is there anything that I haven't talked about in our conversation that I should have?
No, I mean, it's been a really interesting sort of brief tour of many of the areas that we've looked at.
I mean, I would stress that Ken and I always regard ourselves as being paranormal sympathetic.
Ken refers to himself as a compassionate sceptic.
So we're not there to debunk.
My research doesn't debunk.
And over the years, I've deliberately avoided doing that because I am aware of the fact that the paranormal and experience of the paranormal and belief in is particularly important to many people.
It has profound effects on them.
And at a human level, whether it exists or not doesn't always matter because, as I said before, it can provide things like reassurance, it can provide comfort.
Those sorts of mechanisms should never be overlooked.
So even at a human level, the paranormal belief in it is important.
You know, it's part of the human psyche to believe in things that are not necessarily fully grounded in science.
And you said that your research is quantitative.
In other words, it's amounts of data.
That means that at the end of the day, you have an enormous great database out of which you can come to some conclusions.
Yes, yeah.
I mean, I mean, it's not just about studying the incidence of belief, for example.
One of the things that we've done is we've looked at the way in which these things are measured.
So, we've also looked at whether the measurement instruments are necessarily fit for purpose.
They seem to be okay, generally speaking.
But that sort of research is also important to make sure that social scientists are making the right sorts of measurements and the scales that they're using are appropriate.
Where are you going to be taking this research?
Where will you be going in 2023?
I'm not sure.
It depends on whether we get more funding or not.
We've just finished a set of studies that looked at whether paranormal, because early research, particularly on superstition and magical thinking, suggested that belief in the paranormal was associated with negative psychopathological factors.
In other words, it was associated with lower well-being and psychological adjustment.
Now, I don't buy into that because when you look at the number of people, as we said before, who believe in the paranormal to a lesser or greater extent, it's particularly high in the same way as conspiracies.
Because it's so high, it suggests that, well, it's not really dysfunctional.
It's not non-adaptive.
It's just, as I said before, part of the human condition.
So, we did a series of studies where we extended, we looked at belief over longer periods than is normal.
And longer periods for psychology research is only eight months, six, eight months.
But typically what people do is they just measure it at one time point.
So, they'll just give people the measures once and then they'll see if they correlate.
So, we gave people multiple measures.
We looked at it over time and we found that paranormal belief didn't have any strong associations with poor psychological adjustment or negative well-being, adverse well-being.
So, that was quite reassuring.
So, it would be nice.
Where I would like to take it is I would like to look at the positive benefits of believing in the paranormal to see whether it can enhance people's worldview in any particular ways and what its adaptive functions are.
It's interesting, isn't it, that you came to the conclusion, and these are views that you hear from time to time, and sometimes it's reflected in my email inbox.
It's interesting that you came to the conclusion that the people who have these experiences, and it's very reassuring to hear this, are neither, as some people claim, crazy nor needy.
Oh, definitely not.
No, no.
And, you know, as I say, that is based on quite limited, you know, in general populations, that's based on quite limited data and approaches.
So we've tried to do more interesting approaches.
Thanks largely to one of my co-researchers, Andrew Denovan, who's an absolute whiz with stats, we've started applying some more powerful techniques.
And we use several different approaches and they reach the same conclusion.
Belief, you know, belief itself doesn't seem to have any detrimental effects.
Would you like to have a strange, totally inexplicable paranormal experience, ghost, or a time slip, or any of those things?
I'd be quite open to it happening.
I think I've had some unusual experiences.
It's just I haven't labeled them as being paranormal.
What's the most unusual?
Gosh, that's a hard question.
You knew I'd ask it.
They're not really paranormal, but they're just a normal part of the human psyche.
But deja vu experiences are quite unusual.
One I did have, one I did have was I had a sleep paralysis because I used to teach about it and talk about it, but I'd never actually had an experience.
And I thought that there was, I think it was an entity was trying to get into my bedroom.
And I thought, oh gosh, and I felt the dread.
You could feel the dread welling up.
And then I just sort of thought, it's a sleep paralysis experience.
I just sat back and was able to step outside of it, which was quite an interesting, which was quite an interesting thing to happen after all these years of talking about sleep paralysis, to actually have it and to be able to consciously interact with it in such a way to say, yes, I know what it is.
So you actually rationalized the experience while you were having it.
Yeah.
I think that's pretty rare.
Neil, listen, I've enjoyed this conversation.
I think it's good to talk around these things.
And I think the good thing to know for most people, I mean, I get emails from people and I look at my email inbox constantly, a number of times per day, every day.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm looking at emails.
And some people assume that people who investigate these things or interrogate these things academically are against them.
And I have to tell them from the number of people I know and have interviewed and have spoken with and know personally, that's not so.
There are many people in the academic sphere, very famous people.
The first one that I met was Alan Gould from Nottingham University years and years ago, who has a new book out.
And I think Alan is closer to 90 than 80 now.
But, you know, he was doing this stuff years ago.
So there are serious people in academe who want to understand this better.
We'll never, I don't think in our lifetimes get to the bottom of all of it, but we might have an idea, a sniff at understanding it better.
And that's what you're all about, it seems.
Yes, indeed.
As I say, it's born from interest.
You know, it's just being interested in the sorts of things people believe in, the sorts of experiences they have, and not trying to explain them away, But just to apply psychological models to them in order to provide a fuller understanding.
And if that understanding is the psychological approaches being used are inadequate or could be developed further, then that's a great outcome.
Keep on doing the good work.
Neil Dagnell, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
Thanks, Howard.
What a very different kind of conversation ranging over many areas.
Your thoughts on this and all guests on The Unexplained as ever gratefully received?
Please go to the website theunexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can, you know, send me an email from there.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained online.
And until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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