A few days ago I watched “Derren Brown investigates” which followed the life of a ‘psychic’ who claimed to be able to contact the dead.
It was interesting to watch and it covered the psychic as he gave talks in which he appeared to communicate with the dead. The way this is done is simply in a technique called cold reading, where you gain as much information as possible just by looking at them. People give away much more information about themselves from what they wear, how they respond to a certain statement, and many other factors.
The psychic used a lot of numbers, and repetition of facts. When using numbers, the host would attribute their own meaning, and fill in the details, for example the number 5 meaning the number of people in their family and the number 3 meaning the number of siblings in their family. It is a lot of guesswork and mixing in some Barnum statements to make the hits seem sucessful.
At the start of each personal visit, the psychic would perform some data collection, by ‘using the toilet’ upstairs. In the shows, the people attending stated they had seen the psychic personally a few times before, and had a reading from him before. No wonder he got hits on the night. It seems the same people are being misled over and over. The second personal visit was unsucessful, and the psychic blamed this on Derren having visited the woman at the house previously on the same day.’ This would exhibit negative skeptic energy’, and therefore make the reading not work and clearly this makes no sense. Just before they entered the house, the psychic asked Derren if he had visited the house before, Derren said yes, he had, and later, the psychic misremembered and stated that ‘if he had known Derren had visited the house before, then they would have not have fallen for this ruse’. In the show, Derren cold read successfully the facts of a woman having a holiday at the Maldives, having a _blue_/silver cat, amongst over things. The best the psychic could come up with was ‘did you have a mini in the past’, response was ‘I drive one now’ – when he clearly knew that fact as she drove and parked next to him. Wording of the question is important, as simply saying ‘do you have a mini’ is less likely to have an effect, as the respondant simply says yes, and it is easier to think off the top of your head of what happened earlier e.g. I drove in with it today. Testing the psychic on celebrities was a bit useless, as it is possible to research a lot of information beforehand, e.g. on wikipedia. Again, vague and partial questions, even if complete knowledge is known is able to make the host fill in the gaps and make it seem more sucessful to the reader. The fact that psychics visit people’s homes make it a lot easier to cold read, as homes contain a wealth of personal information relating to the person.
I later visited the psychic’s website, and he had a response to the show which is below.
One line is interesting:
>>” I do not ask you to believe what I do is true. My gift provides a lot of people throughout the country with a certain amount of comfort and happiness. Like many other psychics and mediums throughout the country, you either believe us or you do not. I am not forcing you to believe me but the programme will have upset a lot of people who do.”
Clearly the psychic, now after seeing the show realises, that he is completely disingenious in what he does. The website even states a disclaimer: ‘For entertainment purposes only’. Obviously people who are paying _do_ care if what they are paying for is true or just a scam. They would be unlikely to pay for a personal reading if they did not believe.
The price of entertainment.
There are a lot of moral implications of passing of this ‘entertainment’ to unknowing individuals. Often, they are victim to this sort of scam, and they are unaware of such charlatans that operate. They are playing with the memories of the bereaved, and false comfort is likely to be psychologically damaging when they find the truth. There is no proof it even provides _any_ amount of comfort, as there have been no real scientific studies done on this. The money could be better spent on other things.
Why do people fall for this.
People may have a like for mystery and things that cannot be explained. For science, it is being able to tackle problems that lie on the forefront of unsolved problems, and most of the mind is intrigued with difficult challenges and puzzling questions. For example the large hadron collider is one of the largest scientific experiments in an attempt to find more about the Higgs boson. On the other hand for pseudoscientists, this is simply a way to mislead other people by selling them snake oil in buckets and other forms of quackery. In this day and age where information is so abundant, it is a big surprise to me that these practises still are commonplace especially in a developed country such as UK.
An example of this is homeopathy. This is the practise where selling very diluted solutions will heal a person. In fact, the more diluted the solution is, the better its effects. Actually, the dilution is so great that there are definitely no molecules of the substance, essentially they are selling water. A small vial of pure H_2O, in supposedly reputable chemists on the high street such as Boots, sells for around 5 to 10 pounds.
It is now post recession, we are recovering from bad ecomomic times, and UK just appointed a new government, which I can hope has the best thoughts not only of ensuring the wellbeing of its inhabitants, but also the economic stability of the country. This is not helping when we are throwing money away such as building hospital wings and giving money to people practising pseudoscience. If there is one thing that should be cut from the NHS budget, then it should be 4 million, which is unecessarily wasted, although it is a small proportion of the however many billions, every little helps.
The difficulty of stopping such practises, is that the law is a big invisible forcefield that everybody holds, one that is not on the side of truth and reason. It is on the side of whoever has the most money, time and resources to hand. In producing a television show on this subject, where peoples livelihoods are spent from this activity, one has to tread softly on ice, as a biased opinion affects the famity of the subject and the liability to be sued.
The question is, will this ever be stopped, and if so how? I believe that education is the most important thing. I recently noticed that for the new generation of teenagers, critical thinking is an optional subject at AS level. I think that this essential education should be made mandantory at a much earlier age. People should be educated, and then they have a choice of being able to consider alternative views and opinions and make their own mind up based on the facts and evidence they have received.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading
Homeopathy is witchcraft
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/alternativemedicine/7728281/Homeopathy-is-witchcraft-say-doctors.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
http://pastebin.com/8yZXXcZq – statement from pyschic regarding derren brown show.
