 So we've heard a lot of extraordinary claims from a lot of people at this festival and they're fairly common and One of the we've chatted with a bunch of our students about some of the extraordinary claims. They've experienced and I'm sure people at home Have had some similar experiences One of the ones that I remember it was a student who said that She was walking through a shopping mall and it just so happened that this was the anniversary of her grandmother's death While she's walking through the shopping mall over the loudspeakers. There's music playing But midway through a song it cuts out and it shifts to her grandmother's favorite song Yeah, another common one was premonitions. So dreaming about something and then it coming true and this isn't innocuous stuff like Dreaming about an apple and then seeing an apple the next day. These are really specific things that they're remembering So dreaming about a crow jumping from tree to tree and then seeing it the next week Dreaming about an old friend and having them appear on your doorstep the next day. That's right And this is our job here is to figure out why people believe weird things and not You know, it's not enough just to say as we said before that People like to believe in weird things or they take comfort in the paranormal or you know That doesn't really explain anything instead. What we're trying to do is to focus on the cognitive mechanisms to focus on Explanations in terms of perception attention memory And one of these things that we're going to be dealing with is is ambiguity, which is really important We've touched on it a few times in the course We last episode we talked about the necker cube a spinning dancer and a bunch of different things by stable illusions This is a really nice example the figure here the letter B that or the number 13 is ambiguous in the context of A and C It looks like a B in the context of 12 and 14. It looks like a 13 And again, this is two different ways that you can interpret this event Another example was by Tom Gillovich. He provides a Smiling person now this smiling person can either be interpreted as Being friendly. It's a genuine smile if you like the person if you don't like the person you might interpret it as a smirk as being Malicious somehow or you know, they're up to something but it's exactly the same smile being interpreted in two different ways Which is a little bit more realistic. Yep, so that's ambiguous information I think there's a second factor going on called multifaceted expectations So yes with the ABC and the and the 12 13 14 They're really only two ways of seeing it just like the spinning ball arena It spins left or it spins right the necker cube pops out or comes back in that they're two dimensions They're two ways of seeing it, but much of the objects that we deal with and The events that happen in our everyday lives are not two-dimensional. They're not even three-dimensional. They're multi-dimensional They're multifaceted. So in one episode we talked about talent and there's several different ways that can be viewed We talked about something as innocuous as a job interview and how many different ways that can be viewed so Dealing with that that complexity and ambiguity that there there are so many ways that these things can be viewed That's when it when our our pattern recognizes really kick in we really see what we expect to see when we have Multidimensions, that's right and the two can operate together You can have ambiguity and these multifaceted expectations working in conjunction and one really nice example of this was when we visited the Horoscope booth at the mind-body spirit festival now they prepared these These personalized portraits that on the basis of where the planets are and how they're interacting in the sky and These portraits that they create are anything but personalized right and they're extremely multifaceted and extremely ambiguous So one of the examples that they provide was this from the sign of Venus now It says a beautiful mind and a mind for beauty. So they are somebody who has a beautiful mind and mind for beauty And you can read here when it comes to personal relationships You tend to be rather idealistic you seek a lover who is both intelligent and good-looking That's because it's in Libra in the fourth house You're also going to have has something to do with your home. Your home is also going to be that way as well so Venus is very is very Important in the person in this this person Whereas if it was in the first house they themselves would be quite beautiful they would be very Focused on their own appearance whereas here this person here because of the position in the sky Their home is where they focus their sense of beauty on or where they their sense of style and because it's in Libra They're probably a very good sense of style because That's an even thing now these portraits that they've put together are really anything but personalized They would really apply to anybody. I mean, what do you mean by idealistic or? Good-looking or charming. These are very sort of general statements and as Richard Wiseman said These are called Barnum statements or the Barnum effect is the fact that there's something for everybody That there's an enormous amount of overlap between your own characteristics and these sorts of statements Anybody who's reading them would be able to find Something of themselves in them and they're often very flattering as well to say that you have untapped potential or that you're an independent thinker Right. I mean who doesn't want to think that about themselves. Yep another factor that's operating I think is multiple endpoints now We need to think about this when we're trying to assess the validity of these claims and the analogy is Casting a wide net Catching a big fish in that wide net and then claiming that you caught it with a spear, right? And this is very common in psychic predictions So a psychic may say something like oh, I see an older gentleman in your family is having heart problems I see some pain around the chest and there's a weight there now What can that mean again? It's multifaceted. So what's the older gentleman? It could be my older brother my My father my grandfather it can happen across that dimension and it can also happen in time So what kind of heart problem are we talking about a death? Is it a diagnosis? Is it a prediction that's going to happen and what is a heart problem? So does an angina count? does Forgetting your heart medication on that particular day coming back from the doctor with a diagnosis of high blood pressure Does that count and let's not forget about just the base rates that is Just the probability of you having anyone in your entire family with any sort of heart issue whatsoever is really likely I mean I just thinking of my own family I could think of about a dozen people in my family or extended family that you that might Count as part of that right, but I I think one of my favorite examples of this was In your conversation with the chiropractor at the mind-body festival And in that in that conversation he rattled off at least a dozen possible Symptoms that you might have as an indication that you might need some chiropractic treatment As your spine comes up all of you tends to lean in that direction now if your spine was lovely and straight Your head would be sitting over here. Obviously. It's not so it would suggest that your spine comes up As a little bit of an S shape and might trigger another weak area here Can present as obvious either neck pain shoulder pain or headaches and of course the nerves in that part of the spine deal with cardiovascular function So low energy trouble sleeping snoring shortness of breath hay fever asthma allergies blood pressure issues chest pains and gyna Functional heart problems dead, you know those sorts of things may be symptoms. Gotcha. None of those no good about death But just because they're weak areas doesn't always mean they present as symptoms Now he just rattled off a whole bunch of different symptoms everything from Trouble sleeping to lower back pain to death But I think most people when listening to this set of symptoms who are considering the possibility of chiropractic treatment Would be able to find something in their own experience to kind of cling on to so he cast a really wide net And so I suspect that he'd catch somebody within that net if it's cast wide enough And I think if you combine these multiple endpoints with ambiguous statements like we talked about before Then that's nicely captured in the Japanese healing booth that we visited as well. Now they made some really kind of ambiguous statements about the the effects of their treatment for example improved well-being or increased happiness or Strengthening the immune system. I mean, what do these even look like if you were to if you were to test whether somebody's Well-being was improved. I mean, what would that actually look like? It's it's a really broad characterization Yep, and think about another dimension that's operating in time So we've got multiple windows of time that are happening here So if if a prediction is made when do you stop looking for hits if a healer says they've healed you or they've Treated you when should you stop looking? When should you expect to feel better? When should you stop looking to feel better and say well that healing mustn't have worked now? Tom Gillovich has spoken about this previously. It's a common belief that Things happen in threes so homicides natural disasters these things occur in triplets, right? But when do you stop counting it as a triplet when you get to three? Yeah, exactly, right? So if you if you allow for enough variability in these windows of time these predictions can only be Confirmed it's very difficult to disconfirm. That's right. And a nice example of this Is quite a personal one actually I was talking to my mom on the phone in preparing for this course I'm preparing for the segment in particular and telling her about Going to the mind-body spirit Exhibition and so on and talking to tarot card readers and she said I went to a tarot card reader once about 30 years ago, I guess 30 years. Yeah, it was about 9 or 10 years old and she went to this tarot card reader and it kind of freaked her out actually a little bit because that the the readers said that She would be in a large fire Right, she'd be okay, but the rest of her family might not be and so from that point on she actually lost sleep in thinking about this and in dwelling on on what she said during the reading and You know, I mean if if you kind of fast forward she still remembers that reading 30 years later And so you can imagine if there was a fire A decade later or something she would probably be very likely to attribute it as a success on behalf of that particular reader Yeah, or if it refers just to fire down the street or your next to a neighbor or a brush fire All of these things would probably count so there's enough variability in the in the in what counts as a fire in the time That it takes it could be 30 years on and you can still count it as counted as a hit on on on that part So that really freaked her out when she had this reading and there was the possibility that Her family was going to burn in a fire, right? I mean that's that's kind of scary and when you're thinking about whether to count the prediction as a success or not There's a whole bunch of things that can vary in terms of the nature of the fire, right? We we actually a few years later had our Christmas tree burned down Due to my remote control car. Does that count? Is that a fire? I mean it could be a brush fire. It could be a fire at our neighbor's place. That's close enough I mean or When obviously it's 30 years later and she still Thinks about that particular reading and if there was something 30 years on she would she still might be able to make that link So I think these things Variable windows and time multiple endpoints. I think are really important Yeah, so we've gone through a few of these general mechanisms that are sort of operating in Paranormal phenomena and predictions such as these I've got a couple more to get through But let's ask people a few questions before we move on to make sure they really grasp what's going on here You