 Our next speaker is a Susan Blackmore. She's going to talk about fighting the fakers and the failing. What's really interesting about Ms. Blackmore is she was a parapsychologist for a number of years. I think the only parapsychologist who is speaking at TAM, I know for sure this year, but now as a psychologist she researches memes, consciousness, and anomalous experiences. So her haiku is this. Now I am conscious. I used to be unconscious. I like this better. Please welcome Susan Blackmore. Thank you. I don't know. Do I really like it better? Sometimes I lie in bed at night and think, I just go to sleep. Oh, it's just too painful being conscious. Do you ever think that way? It's quite agonizing being conscious, isn't it? Now, do you know who this is? Shuri Blair. Shuri Blair? Well, I thought you'd all be ignorant Americans and I'd have to give you a clue. Here's a clue. Aren't they lovely? But the point is, what is she wearing? Pretty, isn't it? Nice attractive thing. Sort of natural. Doesn't it make you feel kind of warm and pleasant to look at that lovely woodland scene? And how about this? She's got one on two. So, don't you think if two of the world's most powerful and influential women are wearing this thing, perhaps you should consider wearing one, too. It's called the bioelectric shield. Well, I wonder whether you would benefit from it. So let's try a little quiz. Are you ready for a quiz? Yes. Okay, what I wanted you to do is I'm going to ask you four questions and I want you to answer either yes or no, okay? Truthfully, I want the true answers, all right? So here we go with this quiz. Right, first of all, do you work around computers, electrical equipment? I need my glasses, I'm so old. Fluorescent lighting or in an office or a school environment or around sources of electrical energy and radiation? Yes. Well done. Are you impacted by other people's energy stress or moods? Do you experience low energy, irritability or stress? Does travelling tire you? Yes. Well done. Well, if you answered yes to even one of those questions, you could benefit from a bioelectric shield. You see, yes, good, you're getting the hang of this. See, it will protect you from all that nasty electromagnetic radiation which weakens you and makes you feel stressed and puts you down and so on. It will shield you from all those other horrible people who are kind of emitting nasty vibes that get to you. And it will strengthen you physically, muscles, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. You can't resist, can you? Well, imagine I'm going back a while because it's a long time since I did this sort of stuff. I should perhaps confide in you, although some of you probably know, that I gave up all this stuff quite a long time ago. I'd had enough of it. I couldn't stand it anymore. And they kept inviting me to town and I kept saying, no, I don't do that stuff anymore. No, you're going to leave me alone. But after more than a decade, I kind of plucked up the courage to go back to thinking about these things. And here I am. But it kind of... Thank you. It brings it all back. It brings back the day in 1999 when I was sitting on a plane and the only newspaper available was The Daily Mail, which is not my normal favourite reading, and there was this picture of Cherie Blair. And I was incensed. And I guess you need something to drive you, don't you, to do the hard work. And this is one of the reasons I chose this example, just one example of the many things that I did over all those years, because you need some kind of motivation to make you do the hard work involved in really finding out. It could be true, you know. Couldn't it? I mean, it could be true that specially-aligned crystals hanging around your neck all day could balance the energies of your body in such a way as to protect you. It doesn't sound very likely or very plausible, but we shouldn't just say, can't be, you know? So we have to investigate. And to find out the truth about it, and that's what I decided to do. So I wanted to do some experiments. Now, the interesting thing about the bioelectric shield, as opposed to some other claims, is basically these are straightforward testable claims, which is, you know, really helps. If it says it strengthens you physically, well, you can measure muscle strength, whether you get stronger or weaker. If it says it protects you from the bad effects of phones, you measure those effects. And so you've got a good starting point. But it also is particularly susceptible, as you can imagine, to all kinds of expectation effects and placebo effects. So if I hang something around your neck and tell you you're going to feel better, however skeptical you are, it may have some kind of effect. So obviously you need some kind of a double-blind test. So the bioelectric shield lends itself pretty well to a standard double-blind experimental design. That means you've got to have some real bioelectric shields with real crystals and real balancing and all that, and some sham or placebo or copy empty bioelectric shields that are indistinguishable from the outside. That's quite a tall order. But I was lucky. I got in touch with the UK distributor. Now we're going back to almost the beginnings of, you know, email not being very efficient and not being much of an internet and so on. Web, I mean. So this was all kind of to begin with letters and ringing up people. I found the UK distributor and he put me in touch, his name's David Chambers. He put me in touch with the manufacturers. Charles Brown, who invented the bioelectric shield and his wife Virginia, who runs the company. After long twing and froing, they said they really wanted their marvelous product to be tested and they would provide me with six real and six sham bioelectric shields. Right. So now I've got to design the experiment. What I wanted to be sure about was that they couldn't cheat and I couldn't cheat because it's got to go both ways. You know how many people say in response to Randy's million dollar challenge, well, he'd never let you know I could be psychic and he'd just cheat and pretend I wasn't. You know, they do that and I didn't want that to happen to me and I wanted it to be genuinely fair and open and equal. So the way we did it in the end was we asked them to send us the six real and six sham bioelectric shields numbered with some random numbering system that we would not know and they would keep the record of which of these one to 12 were real and which were sham. Meanwhile, we, back in Bristol in my lab, would get 12 volunteers, all women in the university and we would assign six of them to wear the real thing and six of them to wear the sham and we would letter them, A, B, C, D, E up to 12 letters and keep a record of those secretly in the lab and then we would invite them to come and they were willing to fly all the way over from the States to Bristol and to come and bring the piece of paper with the numbers on and at that point we would show them the results and we would open both the lists and match them all up. It's got good design, off we go. So what we did was we had these 12 participants and first of all we got them in for a practice and we measured their strength with a hand dynamometer so kind of, you know, you have to go like this several times and you can measure your physical strength. We gave them a mood scale to measure alertness, happiness and calmness which were three of the things that the bioelectric shield is supposed to help and we gave them an alternative therapies questionnaire which measured how much they believe in the effects of alternative therapies of various kinds. Then for two weeks we measured all of these things regularly and then we, you have to remember the bioelectric shield takes 24 hours to balance to your personal energy fields. So we got it balanced, gave them 24 hours, again 48 hours. We gave plenty of time for it to balance to their energy fields. Then we had the baseline measure and then for the experimental time it was between five and eight weeks it was very difficult to get fit all the tests in hence the varying length of time in which they wore either the wheel thing or the sham and they didn't know which was which and we didn't know which was which. My assistant did it in such a way that I gave them the shields he knew the letters I didn't and I gave them the shields so it was truly double-blind. Then the day arrived. Virginia flew over, came from the airport, came to the lab and I was really like we've got to be absolutely accurate here. You know we won't have any kind of random magician kind of tricks going on you know what they're going to play on me I've got to be really really careful we've got to be absolutely sure about the time when we open the list and everything and in comes this lovely charming lady oh hello hello do you want my list do you want my list here? No no no take it away take it away sit over there and she was just so nice and friendly and all my kind of fears about magic and trickery and I thought she's just really she really believes this stuff so the first thing that we did was to give all the data in fact these are separated for wheel and sham but what we showed them was data like this but without the numbers on and asked them Mrs. Virginia and David from England to on the basis of these data we gave them all the data for each subject with the letters on to choose which they thought were the people who had the real shield because if the bioelectric shield does what it's supposed to do then they ought to be able to pick out pretty reliably which people are wearing the shield the real shield and which are wearing the fake shield the statistics work such that if they got six right obviously it would be highly significant if they got five right it would still be statistically significant if they got four or fewer it would not be so it was really exciting they chose there are the 12 lots of data laid out let them have as long as they wanted to look at the data there was a hand strength and you know all these different bits of data for each subject they poured over it and they definitely definitely these six are the real and these six are the fake and we opened the envelopes we compared the numbers cross check let them cross check put them on and they got four right it was kind of frustrating because that's a little bit more than the three that you would expect purely by chance but it's not significant so ok so we proceed after that we could then go and analyze the data properly which is what we did and you can see here just an example where we can compare the data for the real people the people who had the real shield on the left with the people who had the placebo on the right and you can see just by eye that it's not very convincing I won't show you all the data it's probably sufficient to say that none of the differences that we found were significant and they were kind of strange I mean if you look at this lot the shield is supposed to increase alertness, happiness and calmness it appears from this that it decreases alertness it doesn't do anything to happiness and it does increase calmness a little bit but not very much but all these differences are very small and in fact you would expect alertness and calmness to be negatively correlated because they're sort of related to measures of arousal anyway so what next well when they looked at this data we took them off for lunch in the university not very glorious canteen and we sat there and talked about it and they talked to each other and they looked pretty down they looked kind of like sort of reminded me of the man who was abducted by aliens and has an implant in his mouth and I showed him that it was actually dental amalgam and he was really quite low for a while and then anyway they were a bit like that they were kind of like we should have got more right and then they started to realize what had happened you see subject B hadn't been wearing it long enough you see there are some people but it doesn't 24 hours isn't enough it can take a whole week even two weeks for some people to balance to their energy and obviously that one was one of those because you could tell by the way the data went that she was one of those people and what about this person well that person began with a very high alertness in the first place so of course that isn't fair test because it wouldn't work and by the time we'd finished lunch they were very very happy indeed with all the data so they said some people blocked the shields energy some people needed longer but the real clincher was that they said and this came later when she'd gone back to America she said that she'd gone to the factory where they make these things and the man who puts in the crystals puts them in with positive intent from his heart and the trouble is that he's so used to doing this in this positive environment with this positive energy that when he was asked to make shamans he couldn't really do it because he's still giving out the positive energy so that the shamans really were kind of working even though they didn't have any crystals in them they still had the effect it made my life a little bit difficult but there was another claim that I wanted to test and this was the effect on mobile phones because at this time we're now talking 2000 there was beginning to be a big scare about the effect on mobile phones more and more people were getting mobile phones and it was said that they make you weaker they make you stressed they make you tired and you need something to protect you from this bad effect so here we have another classic testable claim very reasonable thing that you can test so we did experiments in which with these experiments we had 40 subjects these were not such long term experiments as the previous ones didn't do them over weeks and weeks we did them over a much shorter period but again half the people had shamans made this time with definite negative intent for the shamans and positive intent for the real ones and we took a baseline measure of the strength and then give the people the phone and you would expect them to get weaker because they held the phone and talked to the phone and listened to somebody talking for 10 minutes and they should get weaker and then do it again with the phone and with the shield and all randomised and here you can see the results doesn't quite fit what it's supposed to do so you've got the baseline unfortunately the groups were not equal on the baseline but it doesn't matter because you subtract from baseline so with the phone well they didn't get weaker actually with the phone so the middle one is with the phone for 10 minutes and then the last one there is with the phone and the shield and as you can see the real one made them quite a bit weaker and it was supposed to make them stronger oh dear the pyroelectric shield doesn't really seem to be doing what it's supposed to do so what was their reaction to the phone experiment well it was as follows now this comes rather later hang on a minute let me just I won't go backwards the phone experiment which we did and got the negative results we did several other experiments as well and we had them all published in a journal called alternative therapies and after that was done and we had shown them the paper they'd seen it all they'd agreed that it was an accurate description of the experiment and it was published and after that we got the following letters from them Dear Dr. Blackmore regarding the bioelectric shield study over the last several weeks you and I have determined that there was an email sent to you from our company that you never received in this email we informed you that the samples we gave you for your study had mixed up the real shields with the sham shields not knowing this you published your study and in return we were quite surprised to see the study published since that time another trial study done by an independent group of researchers used a heart rate variability test to judge the effectiveness of three devices that claimed to reduce the effects of electromagnetic radiation from cell phones this was published in alternative medicine September 2002 I was from Virginia and from the inventor Charles the shields were then returned when they were returned they were physically open to see if the coded numbers had been correctly assigned this revealed there had been a mistake in the numbering of some of the shields now note that alternative medicine sounds much like alternative therapies alternative therapies where we publish is a peer-reviewed journal not a great high impact journal to be sure but it's peer-reviewed it's a proper science journal alternative medicine is just a magazine and they wrote an article and it went in there so what can you do this is why I titled my talk fighting the fakers and failing I mean it's kind of a success in a way we did a decent experiment we designed it as well as we could we got the results we published them but it has very little effect and the people concerned have always got some way of coming back to it these are just the more results with a larger number of subjects in which you can clearly see that our phones are really nothing at all there was pardon that's the one you missed there were several like this we did several more experiments one thing that was quite interesting was that it's quite possible obviously people are buying these things and being happy with them and thinking that they really do make them relax and so on why presumably because they have some kind of placebo effect and if that's so you would expect a larger placebo effect in people who are score high on the alternative therapist questionnaire I mean the questions in there are things like do you use homeopathy, do you have you ever had acupuncture, do you believe in the effects of this, that and the other and so you would expect a correlation between the score on the alternative therapist questionnaire and the people who improved wearing the shield and the people who were regardless of whether it was real and placebo and that was the only significant result we got in the entire series of experiments was yes people with greater belief in the effectiveness of these things feel better whether they have the real or the sham the obvious conclusion from all these experiments is that you can hang anything around your neck if it's called a bioelectric shield and looks very pretty you can have balanced crystals and all of those kinds of amazing powers well I wrote to we do have trading laws in Britain which say you are not allowed to sell ineffective things and make false claims you know we're a civilized country you're not supposed to be able to say this thing will do all this, whatever so I wrote to the trading standards authority, a nice letter simple letter explaining what I've done closing the published paper and so on and I got back a very nice letter after a while saying Dear Dr. Blackmore further to Mr. Taylor's letter to you dated the 6th of April, this matter has been allocated to me for investigation as the nature of the inquiry is varied and complex it will take some time to investigate I will get back to you in due course and update you as to my progress what year is it now? well I did try and I didn't have the energy and enthusiasm to go on trying come the year 2000 I'd really had enough can I have a drink of water somebody please? or a drink of anything? whiskey will do gin and tonic would go down quite well at this point remembering all the miseries of it all ah yes and what is happening in the year 2013 which is where we've got to now are you feeling fatigued stressed or overloaded you can protect yourself with this innovative all natural all natural I mean it's a manufactured product we've made a metal I suppose metal is natural isn't it God made it all you can protect yourself and there's a chart at the bottom you see this chart it says you insist you in choosing a level of protection which matches your lifestyle and your AMF exposure so let's see what is available at the very bottom of the chart you can have level 1 of course this one's only for babies and children and pets yeah you get one for your cat but you could go up level 3 is the specially recommended one that's obviously the one I expect you can to get if you like go all the way up to level 4 I guess I don't need to say any more do I other than by the way don't go out and buy one how on earth did I get into all of this well some of you know it all started a very long time ago this is me back in 1970 when I had the most extraordinary out of body experience I've written about it extensively maybe some of you have read about it it started sitting down listening to some fantastic music I don't know Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd or something and I was sitting there late at night going down a tunnel of leaves towards a bright light at the end and then I came out of the bright light and flew around over Oxford it was honestly an extraordinary experience the term near death experience had not been invented then but if it had been I know that I went through all of those stages the out of body experience the extraordinary emotions the clarity, the vision the coming to a boundary the decision to return but also classic mystical features of changing the nature of self completely to the point of ultimately self disappearing or becoming one with everything classical mystical experience of oneness I had no idea what to do with that experience a gift out of somewhere I could not understand it in terms of 1970 physiology and psychology that I was studying so I could perfectly understand why and forgive myself understand myself all those years ago for thinking that it was a paranormal phenomenon and therefore deciding to devote my life to proving to all those closed minded scientists that they are wrong and there's more in the world than in your philosophy and all that kind of stuff and that's why I became a parapsychologist and I was wrong to try to find paranormal phenomena and ultimately concluding that they don't exist and along the way I had some fun and I had some depressing experiences one of the most depressing was discovering that a colleague of my friend of mine, Carl Sargent who was doing fantastic research on the Gansfeld getting really amazing significant results was actually manipulating the randomization procedure took me a long time to find out what was going on and then a depressing month of misery I was in trouble with the Parapsychological Association not him and I wouldn't publish until he would publish his side of the story and years and years later it was finally published but you can see meta-analyses with all these data in which do not ever reference the papers in which I explain what manipulation was done and why the results are invalid they go on claiming that there's evidence in Gansfeld I had fun with people being abducted by aliens I slept in haunted rooms well the aliens I told you about the amalgam here is the nice young man and his alien implant in the roof of his mouth I had all sorts of fun with that I slept in the haunted houses I investigated poltergeists I did all kinds of things I was always in trouble with the believers I would tell you when I was a believer I did not get hate mail from skeptics I was surprised when I became a skeptic I got plenty of hate mail from the true believers who know about spirits and nice things like that and good energies and the most fun thing, the only thing I've done recently was to investigate would you believe there are still people having physical seances with ectoplasm and all that stuff I mean we think of it as being an ancient Victorian pastime where you have a medium sitting in a cabinet and a physical phenomena coming out of the floor lifting tables well this is still alive and well in Bristol I was out of séance last year I just couldn't resist in the end going back they said they had to have some music to get in the right mood and we had ABBA while from the cabinet was that's better I've had enough I can't bear it I hope you can understand dear friends why I can't bear to do it anymore and I am so pleased to know that there are hundreds thousands of you out there not just James Randi but all these organisations who haven't lost heart like me who haven't lost their energy and enthusiasm for fighting the fakers good on you, keep fighting them and let me go home and give it up Susan Blackmore Susan Blackmore