 Stalls there. Stalls where? Stalls then. Stalls why? Stalls how? You ask me stalls soon? I'll tell you stalls now. Karen stalls now. Karen stalls now, ladies and gentlemen. So as you know the themes this year at TAM include fortune telling in the future and some of you might know I'm a linguist so I'm going to talk about prediction and language. So what are some of the ways that people believe that they can talk to tomorrow? Now this talk is going to treat some topics which are explored in my forthcoming book Language Myths, Mysteries and Magic and this is to be published by the University of Chicago Press. So many people ask me, well how is linguistics useful to skepticism? So I'm going to show you. Most paranormal and pseudo-scientific beliefs and practices involve language in some way. So a lot of beliefs and practices that we're interested in require communication on some kind of level. So linguistics can help find natural explanations for a lot of these claims. So this is just a short list including graphology, backmasking, glossolalia, which is the posh term for speaking in tongues, and alleged recordings of voices of the dead. So some of these are unexpected as well for example that big fort and aliens have language and we haven't discovered them so far. So that's an interesting one, but some of these involve prediction as well. But of course many psychics use cold reading and hot reading to predict things that we already know. But many psychics also tend to predict the past. So their readings are interpreted to fit an event that's already transpired and forced to fit the present somehow. So these are called retroactive predictions or post-dictions. This is also known as hindsight bias. And probably the best example, and you've all heard of this guy Nostradamus, the French seer, and he was believed to have predicted the future with about 1,000 different quatrains that he wrote in French obviously way back in the 16th century. But these are very ambiguous predictions and they're complicated by linguistic evolution and translation as well. So they're really just recycled to apply to modern events. And a lesser known soothsayer, her name's Ursula Southhill. She's better known as Mother Shipton and she was kind of the Nostradamus of England way back in the 17th century. And she allegedly predicted the advent of cars and planes and ships. But again these are modern interpretations of her very vague and archaic predictions. So let's look at some language-related methods for predicting the future. So first one, slate writing. This is the original kind of automatic writing. There are many different types and claims, but they're all some form of handwriting that is produced by an external spiritual source. So slate writing was discovered by a doctor, Henry Slade. He is a very infamous Victorian psychic. So this was during the heyday of the spiritualism movement and during seances these magical messages would appear on blackboards, mini blackboards. So they were supposedly written by spirits who tried to validate contact with the dead and also to predict the future which is pretty easy when it's vague and you can just make it up. Now Slade underwent a series of controlled experiments and he failed these when the protocols were put in place to avoid any kind of trickery. Because Slade was faking the writing. He was using tiny pieces of chalk that he was holding in his fingers or between his toes or even in his mouth to produce these messages from the dead. And here is a picture of a seance table. It was called the pew table and there's a little compartment. It's hard to see, but it's a mesh compartment underneath which held musical instruments and props and things like that. So another form of automatic writing and people use these terms interchangeably as well. Trans writing, ghost writing, autography, psychography. So this is written mediumship where a channeler or a host is possessed by some kind of spirit or entity and this proceeds the Ouija board and you'll see the familiar planchette here as well in this picture. And there are several famous cases that you might have heard of. One is the case of Patience Worth and she was an author who would channel various other authors and she wrote plays and poetry and novels and also Rosemary Brown who would channel Chopin and List and even John Lennon and she would another deceased composer who would write music through her so she claimed. And it was actually a famous case with Houdini. He had a reading with Lady Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's mother and she wrote a very long letter supposedly from Houdini's mother. It was about 16 pages long and when Houdini reviewed this he thought this was full of generalizations. This wasn't psychic or this wasn't automatic writing in any way. So he tried to replicate the practice and this actually left Doyle convinced that Houdini had psychic powers instead. So I once did an investigation of an automatic writer and found the same thing. This was called reading. Her reading was full of generalizations and I think that the idiomotor effect was at play as well. This was kind of stream of consciousness, her writing style and really it's about as paranormal as James Joyce who used to use that style. So this is a creative tool of many authors too that the poet Samuel Taylor Colleridge he would use that as a technique. So there's nothing mystical about this or maybe some authors might think that they're to visit from the muses in some way. I meant to show that basically if you do attempt spirit writing this is what it's going to look like. These will be the results. So the last form of spirit writing, automatic writing is phantom writing and this is mysterious handwriting that appears magically on walls and windows. Maybe books on paper written with pens or with blood. So the best case here is a picture of barley rectory. You may have heard of this place. It's a very high profile case. This was the most haunted house in England well before the days of ghost hunters where everything was the most haunted. This is in the late 19th century, early 20th century and the Bull and Foster families were haunted apparently by a series of poltergeists and ghosts. There's a ghostly nun and a headless coachman and this case was investigated by the legendary investigator Harry Price. You may have heard of him. So here's an example of some of the automatic writing that took place there and these disembodied pens would appear and right on the walls. So these are some creepy examples of spirits requesting light and prayers and help. So these were revealed to be pranks basically by the families who were involved and you see these writings were scrubbed off the wall straight after they appeared. Yet amazingly they were described and photographed many years later. So like to look at graphology briefly this is the claim that we can identify and predict personality traits based on the style of our handwriting. The dots on our eyes and the crosses on our T's and we're not talking about assuming that someone is a doctor because his or her handwriting is eligible. So this is yet another kind of body related divination like palmistry or iridology reading the eyes. Some of you may have heard of rumpology that was popularized by Jackie Stallone which is reading the arse. I once wrote about a woman who could read people's toes and she claimed she could tell if someone was raped by the lines on their toes and all kinds of crazy things. So if you read some of these analyses here they're usually quite metaphorical that's a form of sympathetic magic in a sense. So if you have small handwriting somehow you're a timid person or if you're heavy handed you're a control freak. So I wanted to do a mini demonstration George if you come out here. So I'd just like you to find and this might be difficult for you to see on here. I'd like you to find your Y on this chart. How do you draw your Y's? We'll be the closest anyway. I was hard pressed to find mine on here but everyone have a look and see if you can find your Y. He's drawing it in the air. That's that motion by the way. Is it ten? Ten. Okay. Number ten, yeah. Okay. So this is a graphology chart that attributes the way that we find Y. It's true George. So apparently you're open to any kind of sexual activity and you're very inquisitive. Wow, okay. Yeah. You've learned something about yourself. Yes, yeah. Put it back. Does not even masturbate. Wow, that's... Remove sexual... Wow. I'll show you the recipe. Okay, yeah, cool. Thank you. You're pressed for time here. Thanks. So there are lots of different schools of thought. That's why I wanted to show this. I just found this online. These are very subjective obviously and there are many conflicting interpretations that you'll find of these handwriting styles. There's also the theory of graphotherapy. I'm not sure if you might have heard of that. That is if you change your handwriting, you can somehow change your future. So if you're a 16 and you change your Y to a 1, then you'll be cured. So there was a show in Britain in the 1990s called James Randy's Psychic Investigator. And in episode six... Woo! In episode six, a graphologist appears on the show. And as a test, a mini-test, he was asked to connect subjects to their professions on the basis of their handwriting. So here's what happened. That's not kicking in. I'm sorry, I need the video to play. I'm going to ask each one of these ladies in turn, first of all, number one, are you indeed... I'm so sorry, I'll play this again. I'm going to ask each one of these ladies in turn, first of all, number one, are you indeed a salesman? Vote with yes or no. You are not a salesperson. And number two, are you a computer expert? You are not. Number three, are you the artist? Ah, you are. And number four, are you that secretary we're looking for? Apparently not. And number five, are you a farmer? I see. Well, would you please move to the correct positions that you belong in, the four ladies that were not correct? Would you move to the correct positions? Now we know who is really in that profession. We expected that according to chance, Duncan, you would get one correct, and you've got exactly one correct. Thank you very much, Duncan. We're very grateful for you coming along here this evening. As we mentioned earlier, graphology is widely used on the continent, and its use is increasing here in Britain. But there seems to be quite a margin of error. How would you feel if your career depended on the analysis of your handwriting? So Randy raises an important point here, and that is that he highlights one of the dangers of graphology, that it's discriminatory if it's used in human resources for some way or as expert testimony in court. Although I haven't been able to find any examples of that for my book. It's also dangerous if it's used for diagnosis. Very few conditions are evident in our handwriting styles, but they're not, can't be diagnosed with graphology anyway. For example, there's a condition called, or a symptom called micrographia, where your handwriting becomes very small and scrolled, and it becomes progressively smaller. And that's a feature of Parkinson's disease. Now, graphology is popular in many magazines to interpret celebrities' handwriting. In the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, he attended the World Economic Forum back in 2005, and some scribblings of his were snatched up by some graphologists who wanted to interpret them to gain some insight into his mind. So their analysis showed that Tony Blair is struggling to concentrate. He's not a natural leader. I mean, there may be some truth to this. Struggling to keep control of a confusing world than an unstable man who's feeling under enormous pressure. But it turns out that this wasn't Blair's handwriting. I'm sorry, I'm screwing with this. So this was the handwriting of Bill Gates. I'm sorry, I'm going through this again. And the graphologists were basically doing a cold reading of Blair. So moving on to letters from heaven. So these are letters that claim divine authorship. Some are believed to be written by God or Jesus or angels. And the original letters were said to be written in gold or with the blood of Jesus, that they fell from heaven, that they were found near the crucifixion site or that they were delivered by an apparition of the Virgin Mary. They would contain commandments, biblical narratives and prayers, and they're found across languages and across religions, which I think is really interesting. The recipients were instructed to copy and carry the letter as a kind of amulet, and they were promised forgiveness of their sins if they did so. However, if they should doubt the contents, then they'd be threatened with disease and death. So is this sounding familiar at all to everyone? These are the predecessors to chain letters. So early chain letters began with money chain letters. Some of you may have heard of the prosperity club letters and sender dime letters, where the recipient is instructed to send money to people who are listed on a list, and then they update that and then they forward it on to other people and hope that they're going to receive money. So as we know as skeptics, something for nothing rarely works for more than a few people at the very beginning. And these are the forerunners to multi-level marketing, and I've lost my notes here. I've lost everything on the screen. And so he comes up again. He's deliberately set me up. This is his way of getting some stage time. How often do you get to get on the main stage? Apparently just once. No, twice. So this is before the days of the internet, but these would still replicate quickly. The original sender dime letters were copied over a billion times in the first couple of months. So these later chain letters became about sharing good luck or bad luck and maintaining the chain. So some of you may have seen these St. Jude Novinas in newspapers. They still kick around, published in newspapers and online nowadays too. So readers are asked to petition St. Jude to perform a miracle for a hopeless cause, maybe to cure a terminal illness or to fix an irreconcilable relationship. And the readers instructed to say a prayer like the one here, nine times, perhaps over nine days, or always over nine days rather, and then to republish the ad and they're told that it never fails. So those words are always used in the ads. And St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes, and he couldn't escape his own hopeless cause. He suffered martyrdom in 65 AD. So chain emails. So these are the kinds of chain letters that we receive in our inboxes daily. They feature tacky animations and inspirational statements. So this is the modern format. A lot of them masqueraders, jokes and stories. I put that up there. So in an article in Nature magazine, Dawkins actually likens chain letters to kind of mind virus for some of their features that they feature replication and their periodic outbreaks of particular ones. And there's a kind of immunization effect when you discover that they don't work like this anti-chain letter here. So there are some common features of chain letters and emails and texts. They promise good luck for complying. They promise that you'll receive money or you'll win the lottery or get a new job. However, if you don't comply, you'll receive some kind of bad luck. You'll lose your job. You'll suffer misfortune. You'll die. They contain testimonials, which we're all familiar with, to test to the veracity of the chain letter. And these are usually written by untraceable people. So these are elements of urban legends to chain letters. Nigerian letters, I think they're related to chain letters too, but they're usually presented as a kind of secret offer just between the recipient and the sender. So they're not a mass mailing as such. So moving on, bibliomancy. There are many different kinds of divination that involve language, the aiching and runes. So how do you do it? Well, you take a book and you think about a question. You open it at random. You get a message at random and then you interpret the words as being predictive. Now Saint Augustine, he converted to Christianity due to bibliomancy. He heard a voice in the background telling him to take and read, but that was in Latin, obviously. Not in English. And ironically, later on, he condemned the act. So historically, when churchgoers would go to church and hear hymns being sung, they'd take the first words that they heard as soon as they entered as being predictive in some way. Some people even thinking about a verse of scripture suddenly is believed to be being presented with a revelation of some kind. So bibliomancy is a popular part of... It was a part of pop culture today. Some of you may have seen the book of Answers by Carol Bolt. It's like a book version of the magic eight ball. So I want to do a really quick demonstration because we're running short on time. So I want everyone to stop being a skeptic for a moment. And I want everyone to think about a question. Normally there's a whole ritual to this, but everyone in the room can just think of a question, meditate on it very briefly. George, again. I'd like you to select an answer for everyone in the audience. Just randomly open it. Randomly open it. And read it. Startling events may occur as a result. So did that answer your question? No. Did it? No. Think about it. Go away and think about it. That's what psychics will tell you anyway. So why does it seem to work for some people? Well, they attribute it to their own life. It's a personal interpretation, basically. And they make it fit. So it's why fortune cookies seem to work for a lot of people as well. Now, people usually use the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, some kind of scripture. They might use classical works by Homer or Virgil. You could use any book if you wanted. You could use a telephone book. You could use Flimflam if you wanted to. So who uses this practice today? Religious people still do use it. And it's also a technique that's used by paranormal groups, I've found. So I've got a quick example here of Bibliomansi taken from a documentary about the haunted Stanley Hotel in Estes Park in Colorado where a girl is scratched in this clip. She's scratched by an angry ghost. And a psychic medium by the name of Chris Fleming. His solution is to use Bibliomansi as protection from these evil spirits. Is there a Bible in there? There should be one in every room. I want you to do something now. Over 1200 pages? Went right to Psalm 90 and 91. Chloe, come here. I want you to read this. And believe this when you read this. Okay, because it's true. Read this down here, okay? Right now? Yeah. He who dwells in the secret place of the most high shall abide unto the shadow of the Almighty. I will say, of the Lord, he is my refugees of my fortress. My God and him I will trust. Surely he will deliver you from the snare of the follower and from the perliest person. Sorry, this just goes on. He shall cover you with his feathers in clear hand. I'm feeling it on my back again. Keep going. He doesn't want you to read this. He shall not be afraid of the terror of my night nor of the arrow that flies by day. Nor of clear hand. I'm feeling it. There was a bit more to that, but I think that's enough, isn't it? I will satisfy him. How are you feeling now? I'm okay. She feels better. The Bible is also used for other methods of prediction, such as finding hidden messages that don't really exist. So the perfect example of this is Michael Drossen's Bible code, which uses the equidistant letter sequence code to predict the future, but more often to predict the past. And the study that influenced Drossen and discovered the names and date debts of a number of rabbis, but this was after they died, so it's not terribly amazing. Drossen has made many Armageddon predictions that didn't come true that the world would end in 2002 or 2006. He just kept trying. And the Bible code was mostly debunked by a mathematician, an Australian mathematician, by the name of Brendan McKay. However, maybe there is something to this theory. In the book's sequel, a skeptic by the name of Dave Thomas found this shocking secret message. There must be something to this. Before there was Mr. Ed, there were many smart horses, Morocco and Mascota, and also a horse called Beautiful Jim Key, who could cite Bible passages that mentioned horses. Now, in 1900, Clever Hans was introduced to the world and he seemed to be able to understand language, he could perform mathematical calculations, he could tell the time, he could recognise people by name. Now, a number of academics investigated this situation and discovered that the idiomotor effect was at play. So Clever Hans was really just responding to subtle cues that were made by his owner. So when Clever Hans couldn't see the person who knew the answer, well then Hans, he didn't know the answer either. So intelligent horses are really a product of intelligent training. However, Lady Wonder is psychic. Now, this was a horse that was owned by Mrs. Fonda of Richmond in Virginia in the first half of the 20th century. So it was claimed that Lady Wonder could understand English, she could answer questions and make all kinds of predictions. So how did she speak? Well, she would nudge alphabet blocks with her muzzle. You can see this contraption here. It was kind of a horse-sized typewriter with levers that would activate alphabetical cards and numbers. And over 150,000 people visited her during her lifetime and paid $1 to ask three questions. So she was a kind of horse oracle. She predicted the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S. entry into World War II. But she also made a lot of inaccurate predictions as well. So this was, again, the Clever Hans phenomenon at play and the device was a kind of facilitated communication for horses. Now, Lady Wonder was also kind of Sherlock horse. She'd spelled out cues as to the whereabouts of missing people. But these clues simply reflected current media speculation and public opinion and police activity. So for example, when Lady Wonder predicted that the Illinois police would find the body of a murdered boy in a river, the authorities were dragging the river at that time. So this information was public knowledge and horse detective psychics are really just like the human psychic detectives. So Lady's predictions were just Mrs. Fonda's predictions. So a quick look at some channelers. These are psychic mediums. They're different in the sense that they are a host or a vehicle for a spirit or an entity or an ascended master to communicate somehow. So they're here a few famous channelers. The Law of Attraction proponents, Jerry and Esther Hicks. Esther channels Abraham, which is a collective or a council of teachers. Sylvia Brown channels a spirit guide named Francine. And James Van Prague, he's got a whole series of spirit guides. There's a sister Teresa. There's Golden Feather, who's a Native American, an English doctor named Harry Aldrich and a Chinese spiritual teacher named Master Chang. So channeling has been around since the spiritualism movement, but it really became popular in the 1980s with the emergence of Jay-Z Knight. So in 1977 she just started channeling Ramtha, a 35,000 year old spirit warrior who was apparently born in Lemuria and fought against Atlantis. And he never actually died. He just instead ascended. So he spent these 35,000 years doing stuff. He taught the ancient Egyptians. He influenced Hinduism and Judaism. He inspired Socrates and Leonardo da Vinci. And then he chose this simple housewife as his host so that he could come back and share his philosophies and warn us about the future. So very conveniently though, Ramtha speaks Jay-Z's native language, English. So he's an ascended master, but he can't speak any other language. So channeling is different to claims of speaking in tongues and xenoglossia because the entities conveniently speak in the language of the channeler. So there are lots of explanations for this that the spirits use the same voice as the host because they're using that person's vocal voice. Or they speak English because the hero is understanding English. So Jay-Z adopts a different accent when she's possessed by Ramtha. So let's watch a short clip of this. The greatest prophet assaulted by the powers that be and yet in this audience we worship freedom and righteousness and to survive in an earth to where we enjoy the resources of our inheritance without being taken over. We love your revolution. We are behind you. So that was in Libya, as you saw. So apparently Ramtha can't speak Arabic either, but it seems like Ramtha likes a drink. A different accent, that's just not evidence of channeling in any way. Any competent actor can do that. It's not terribly convincing. Esther Hicks and Sylvia Brown and James Van Prague, they used to adopt fake accents and they've given that up, which is very curious. Now Jay-Z has exposed herself as a fraud in many ways already. This is a picture after a little bit of plastic surgery, I think. So Ramtha makes many failed predictions and many historical and linguistic inaccuracies. So he wrongly prophesied the start of another world war and a Holocaust, rather, back in 1985, and Ramtha claims to have led an army of 2.5 million men into battle 35,000 years ago, but this figure is more than twice the population of the earth at that time. And of course there's no evidence of the existence of Atlantis and Lemuria, apart from Dr. Atlantis from Monster Talk. And Jay-Z only exhibits some very superficial changes linguistically. She adopts a deeper pitch and a different accent, but it's very inconsistent, as you could see there. And strangely, if Ramtha has a native language, Jay-Z doesn't share any examples from this. How valuable would this be to receive samples of grammar and vocabulary from this ancient language? And also, we don't know what an indigenous language sounds like from the Pleistocene Ice Age, but this gives her free reign to make up whatever she likes. But most tellingly of all is that both Jay-Z and Ramtha mispronounce the exact same words. This was just a quick glimpse into some paranormal and pseudo-scientific beliefs and practices that linguistics can help to explain. So thank you very much.