 Now, many of the claims made at the Mind Body Spirit Festival included multiple endpoints, variable windows of time, post hoc ergo, prop to hoc, and some even made appeals to science and to credentials. So Dr. Anna Walsh, MD, PhD. It's done through the Radeonic Apparatus, which was designed by a Western master of yoga, Dr. King. We can quantify it, and we do quantify it. It's very exact. Prayer is a science, prayer is a science. And we use prayer to manipulate the pranic energy so that we can raise the karma of individuals and raise the karma of man come. But people should be really careful when it comes to appeals to authority. Yes, if somebody is an MD, or if they have a PhD, or if they're a top professor, that could give you an indication of their expertise. It could be a useful heuristic for how much they know about a particular area. But it doesn't mean that the claim that they're making is necessarily true. And in fact, in this course, we've tried to be really careful about not introducing our guests as distinguished professors so and so, even though many of them are. We wanted people to evaluate their claims and what they said based on what they said, not who they are. As a... The same goes for us. Yeah, exactly. We want to evaluate our claims based on their merits rather than our titles. The same goes for BaffleGab. Now, you were interviewing somebody at the Mind Body Spirit Festival, a kinesiologist, and I was sitting behind the camera, and I had no idea what he was saying. The way the Western medical system is set up is sort of looking at what happens when that's already happened, rather than looking at going back and winding the clock back to when it started, that depletion process. Because the nonlinear effect is when you actually start dealing with the origins of the trauma that created the energy debt, it starts to actually improve the situation in the present time, which kind of makes no sense because you've already depleted the system. But it actually somehow miraculously collapses the time and space of the causal point, and it starts to reconstruct itself, which is quite nonlinear. Yeah, right, right. I had a really difficult time tracking exactly what he was saying as well. I couldn't really get what he meant by nonlinearity, and I think the vast majority of what he was saying was just, as you said, BaffleGab. And that's something that we really need to be careful with right across all of these different areas. When somebody starts using jargon-filled explanations of things, citing quantum physics and things, just be careful, back up, or even ask them to explain to the level that you can actually understand and track what it is that they're saying. I think another really nice example of a cognitive mechanism that's operating in people's belief in the paranormal is what's called a one-sided event. This is a really nice example. It's also the name of this segment. The phone always rings when I'm in the shower, and you can imagine lathering up in the shower, and you just hear the distant ring tone of your phone in the other room. And you could just imagine, I mean, getting off, drying off, and just picking the phone up just at the right wrong time when they just hang up. Now, that's definitely an event. That's going to stand out in memory. What's not going to stand out in memory is you being in the shower, you know, lathering up, and thinking to yourself, hey, the phone isn't ringing. Yeah. Or how many times the phone rings and you're not in the shower. Exactly. These are non-occurrences, and they just don't factor into any sort of equation when you're evaluating how often the phone rings when you're in the shower. That they just would not occur to you ever. Yeah. You're talking about these salient events. I spoke to Tom Gillovich who had a really good example of salient coincidences. So, looking at psychics in particular, what makes them seem so successful then in their predictions? Well, any time a prediction is confirmed, it's just, you know, takes over your attention. It's a very dramatic thing. And what you see is that local event. Someone said this was going to happen, and now it happened. What you need to do is step back and say, all right, this one little data point here, where does that fit in in a broader pattern of evidence? And it's only if that's repeated a bunch of times that we really can trust it. So, Carl Sagan in one of his books starts out with an anecdote where he had a dream that his father had died and woke up. I may be exaggerated here, but at least as I remember, he woke up in a sweat that, oh my god, my dad, I got to check in on him. He checks in on him, and his dad was fine. And he said to himself that, look, if just so happened that I had that dream and my dad had died, there's no way that anyone could have disabused him of the idea that he didn't have a prophetic dream. But in fact, we populate our dreams with familiar people. Familiar people die. And if you look at all the people in the world and how often we dream, there's going to be a bunch of times when that happens just by pure chance. But good luck trying to convince the individuals who've had those dreams or the people close to them that that was just one of this broad fabric of, you know, pattern of noise, as you're just not going to convince them of that. Now, as Tom just said, these sort of coincidences happen all of the time. And when you're dealing with a large population, happens a lot, right? So with a planet of several billion people, one in a million events happen one in a million times, which is a lot in a big population like that. But even if you look at the small scale, if you're at a party, say, with, say, 23 people at a party, what are the chances that two of those 23 people are going to share the same birthday? It's a lot more likely than you would think. So in a group of 23, the fact that two people are going to share the same birthday is 50-50, right? So a 50% chance that two people are going to share the same birthday in a group of 23, that's a lot more likely than most people would think. In fact, we often use this as a classroom demonstration. It doesn't take that large of a class to really make that point. And if you increase it, if you go from 23 to 30, you have 30 people in a room, the chance of two people sharing the same birthday is 71%, which is pretty good. But what most people do in this sort of problem is kind of what happens when you're dealing with sort of paranormal phenomena as well. They seem to relate it to their own experience. And so when you ask what's the likelihood of two people sharing the same birthday, they think, what's the likelihood of two people sharing my birthday? So what are the chances that it's going to be on the 17th of January? And they're looking at it through that lens instead of through all of the lenses of the people at that party. And the chance of somebody in the room sharing your birthday, it would take 253 people to share the same birthday as you, which is a very different problem than anybody sharing the same birthday. And so I think this really nicely highlights how we kind of misinterpret this idea of coincidence. So we've dealt with several of the cognitive mechanisms that are operating in things like paranormal belief, but also just evaluating claims and predictions in general. Now, I hope people spend a bit of time on working through those general mechanisms, because I think they're really helpful. It's so easy to discount those people who believe. Now, we spent all day with them. These people at the Mind Body Spirit Festival were lovely. We told them what we were doing. We were teaching a course on everyday thinking and we study intuition. And they wanted to share their lives and their experiences with us. There is no way that these people were deliberately trying to deceive people just to make money. They were genuine. So what's happening? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. If these mechanisms aren't occurring to URI as we walk around, why would we think that they occur to believers? Let's give them a chance and try and work through why it is these people believe strange things. Don't just discount them as being silly or believing everything that they see. That's right. Now, we've talked about a bunch of mechanisms from multiple endpoints, variable windows in time, one side of questions. These don't exactly roll off the tongue, do they? So people, they probably didn't occur to most people who were watching this video, just like they wouldn't occur to most people who are practicing these psychic arts or paranormal beliefs. So why would we hold them to the same standard, in a sense? I mean, why would we think that they're guilty of these things necessarily? And I don't think it's that easy. I don't think we can just attribute it to malice or thinking that they're out to deceive us in some sense. They may be. I mean, there may be. And there are some people out there who even know these things and try to frame them in such a way as to manipulate people. But I don't think that that's going to explain most people's behavior. But if that's the case, if most people who are taking this course and even people who are practicing these things have these opinions about the way that the world works, it's not going to be easy to change their minds, to show them about all of these sort of cognitive operations that are happening that lead them to believe in supernatural explanations. Now, I talked to Susan Blackmore about exactly this. Now, you remember, she had a very salient, vivid experience, out-of-body experience. Now, I asked her what it would take to change her mind about the nature of that experience and what it would take to change her opinion about the source of out-of-body experiences. She had quite an interesting answer.