October 18, 2025 • 55 mins
Even though almost half of Americans believe in it, ESP usually is treated as a load of bull by skeptics. But some respected researchers have dared to apply the scientific method to investigate ESP and a few have found some surprising results. Find out all about it with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, it's Josh and for this week's select, I've
chosen our twenty fifteen episode on ESP. It's a really
good one. We talk about all sorts of things about ESP,
including the science, and I know what you're thinking. You're
thinking science and ESP. Yes, indeed, and that's one of
the things that makes this episode so cool. So I
(00:20):
hope you will open your mind, tune in, turn on,
drop out, keep on trucking, and enjoy this episode.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there. I didn't
even have to look why, I just knew.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yes, and dudes and dudets. We are in our new studio.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yeah, can you tell its own different.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
It's the very first one and it's tiny.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Wait what do you mean it's the very first one.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Very very first podcast that we've recorded in here.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Oh gotcha?
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say. I said tiny, but
it's not tiny. It's cozy, but it is all all ours, Yeah,
al ours.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Everybody else at House Stuff Works doesn't really know that yet,
but they will.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah. Because when we actually have butt detection and when
someone sits down in these seats that aren't us to
get a shock.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah. And plus an alarm goes off at our desks.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, what's it called dmr TM? I how are you, sir?
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I'm pretty good.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I feel like this is fancy. This is our first
real like studio. That's not true.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
No, I'm trying to remember. The last one was.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
No, but it's not a utility closet. It's not a
lactation room. It's not Yeah, it's not a murder room.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
It's not like an office with like desk for like
office furniture. Yeah, it's a it's a studio that was
built out for the specific purpose of recording podcasts.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yep. All we have to do is put up our
Aaron Cooper originals. The artwork, got a couple of those
waiting together, and we got to work on the lighting
in here a little bit.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Jerry's said she's gonna hang some china balls for us. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
She keeps pushing the china balls.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So anyway, enough about that. We just wanted to say
we're super excited to be in our new office, in
our new studio.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
It does feel good. Yeah, kudos for that intro. I'm
not going to say that. I knew you were going
to say that.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, I was going to say that too.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
I knew that you were thinking of saying that, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yes, ESP.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Do you believe in ESP?
Speaker 2 (02:44):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
No, not at all. Do you what do you think
it is? Because surely, I mean, just about anyone could
agree that humans have some sort of ability somehow to
make good guesses or to predict the future, or whatever
you want to call it. Do you agree or do
you think it's strictly just us selectively paying attention to
(03:07):
random instances over others.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
I think it's that, and as we'll talk about, I
think it's the just the nature of coincidence is going
to happen because so many things happen every day that
something is bound to seem like something you dreamed about
the night before at some point in your life.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
But the other millions of dreams you have that, don't
I think those are the ones that are the the
tell you know? Do you?
Speaker 1 (03:41):
I don't know? Like I want to. I spent so
many years of my life believing in stuff like that, Yeah,
and wanting to go to Duke University to study at
their parapsychology department. Did you really believe? Yeah, but you know,
believing in ghosts and all this and just that's how
I spent my childhood just reading about stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Very so Ghostbusters really did a number on you.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. When that came along, I was like
this for me, Yeah, but as an adult, it's not
so much that I believe in ESP. It's more that
I I refuse to just utterly disbelieve in the possibility
of it. Sure, okay, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Yeah, I got you there, because we don't know everything
about everything yet, right, but uh yeah, I'm in the
I'm the other camp. And I'm not even gonna say
the sceptic camp because those people just plug me.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Has a bad name, some due to some bad apples.
Not all skeptics, No, but there are some that are
horses asses. Can we say that?
Speaker 2 (04:46):
I don't know. We'll find out, all right, Well, let's
talk about And I thought this was interesting because I
never knew that ESP is just a big collective term
for all manner of par paranormal phenomena. You could also
call PSI.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah, and so a dude named jb Ryan who will
talk about later.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
He coined ESP the Granddaddy.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
And then in the forties another guy coined the term
PSI and PSI is a Greek letter and it's equated
with psyche or the soul ps i. And the reason
that the guy chose PI is because he felt ESP
suggested it was something supernatural. Yeah, sure, and SI he
felt suggested that this is a normal part of humanity.
(05:30):
We just don't understand it.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
It sounds like science, right. But there are several categories
of ESP, and this is the one that I never
knew the actual definitions for these. I sort of just
threw them all in a bag together. You have telepathy,
and that's when you can you know, you're over there
reading my thoughts. Yes, like Chuck is really not happy
to be in the new studio.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
That's not true.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
He'd rather be at home on the couch.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
I'm reading your thoughts right now, and I know that
you like this place.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Okay, Well, you're a telep right. Clairvoyance, which is the
ability to see events or things objects happening somewhere else
at the same time. So are you doing are you clairvoyant?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I am. I'm seeing your couch right now and I'm
seeing it's not that comfy. Yeah, so you're not missing
that much at the moment.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
I know somewhere Jonathan Strickland is waxing his head, bald head.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
That's just a logical assumption.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Okay. Then we have our pre cogs precognition, that's when
you see into the future, retrocogs retro cognition. You can
see into the distant past.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
That's there's another that's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition. Yeah,
like seeing you know, cave like TikTok running around with
the dinosaurs like you do, which I guess never would
have happened. Yeah, But there's another term for retrocognition, whereas
something in the future affects something in the past. So
a decision you make in the future, yeah, affects your past.
(06:57):
And an example given is that you have a dream
about a dinosaur. Now, let's say a spotted dog, okay,
and then the first thing the next morning, you go
outside to water your lawn and this same spotted dog
or a similar spotted dog walks by. The idea isn't
that that was very coincidental or that you had esp
(07:18):
in your dreams, Yeah, but that you seeing that dog
in the morning affected your dream the night before. Oh okay,
so that's another definition that's emerging for retrocognition. That's getting
a lot of traction because of the stuff we're finding
on the quantum scale, just weirdness like that.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
All right. Then you have your mediumship and that's miss
Cleo who can channel dead spirits.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Yeah, I forgot about her.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
And then you heard.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
How much money that woman grossed in the nineties.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
She made a lot of dough, I hope. So yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Mean she was working hard. She had a finite window
of opportunity, and she worked that whole time. She didn't
like buy a sailboat and sail around the world after
like first million. You know, like she worked.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
So you're not in the camp of like she's taking
people's money and taking advantage of people.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
I see that argument, sure, for sure. I also see
like if people want to spend their money on that
and they get something out of it, knock yourself out.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
All right. And then you have a psychometry, which is
the ability to read info about a person place by
touching the person no object. And that's what I like
to call the dead zone. Right, Christopher Walkin, he would
place his hands on you and he would see something.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Man. I think we talked about it recently about how
that movie holds up. Still. Yeah, that is such a
good movie.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Yeah, it really is good, Chris Walkin.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
There's another one, Chuck called telekinesis, which is like Uri
Geller stroking a spoon in it bending right, like being
able to manipulate matter just using a light touch of
your mind.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
But there is no spoon. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Wasn't that from Matrix?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
All right? So basically, like you said, jb Ryan is
the granddaddy of all this, and he actually started studying.
I mean, he was a legitimate scientist. He wasn't some quack.
And this was in the nineteen thirties where he started
at Duke University studying para parapsychology basically.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
And he wasn't the first. He was one of the
first laboratory experimenters in academia to really study SAI. Right
before him, probably about forty or so years before him,
William James and some of his pals at the Society
for Psychical Research really laid the groundwork for applying the
scientific method to the study of paranormal phenomenonah, and they
(09:49):
did two things. They outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like
very famously Madame Bleovartsky. But then they also investigated ones
like the reach them typically with like an open mind. Yeah,
and if they found somebody that they just couldn't explain,
they would they studied them. So they were they were
(10:09):
studying each one with an open mind. And the ones
they figured out were frauds they outed as frauds. The
ones they figured out it couldn't quite explain. Yeah, they
sought to investigate scientifically rather than just saying, oh, they're
frauds somehow, right, So that was the groundwork of the
study of cy.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
What was Madame Blevartsky Steele of the Cony?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
She was she actually she was almost a cult leader,
you could argue she was. She she created Oh man,
it's called like theodism, I think, huh, which is it was?
It was almost a cult. It was a huge movement
in the nineteenth century where like you go to like
(10:53):
a seance and there was a medium there and they
would channel like the spirits of the dead relatives of
people who were there, holding hands in the circle and
stuff like that. And she gained a lot of power
and wealth and prestige until she was outed as a fraud.
And I don't remember the the it's theosophy, that's what
it is. Theoism. Theoism has to do with theo Huxtable.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Did you see The Source Family, by the way, that documentary. No,
I haven't about the La cult in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
I saw the icon on Netflix and never clicked as a.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Good it's really good and it's it's awesome. Actually, I
recommend everyone see. It's one of those where they interview
a lot of them today and they weren't like, you know,
they didn't commit suicide like everyone was like, it was
pretty great.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
They're all fine. They're all just a bunch of hippies.
Still they were out in La Yeah, yeah, right in Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
There was one in There was a documentary I saw
about a cult in Miami and they were like super
fundamentalist Christian but they also were the basis of their
religion was formed on pot too.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Well, that's what the Source Family was.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I wonder if they were related.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Well, it was the seventies. Yeah, there were a lot
of pot cults, I bet.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
But did they turn into like huge pot dealers.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
No, I don't think so this cult did. They had
a band though, and.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
The called the Source M.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
You know, I can't remember the name of the band,
but it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
To Manhattan Transfer.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah, that was. It's a really good documentary that it's
just funny to see how these people now they're like,
it was awesome. Yeah, I had a lot of sex
and smoked a lot of weed.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, that's kind of what got hurt too. They these
guys didn't seem to have a lot of sex though.
They were like real like compartmentalized gender wise, like male
dominance and all that. But they just smoked a ton
of pot all the time, including their little kids. Oh well,
that's not good, like like four year old smoking.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Oh that's terrible.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah, it was in the documentary. It's worse seeing I
don't remember what you.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Had me up. You lost me there.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
I lost everybody there in that documentary.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah. All right, So back to this ESP thing. Jb
Ryan Yeah, jb Ryan, Well, basically, there's a there's a
lot of different outlooks on what ESP might be. Some
people think that everyone's got it, but some people it
just pops up every now and then, like I might
(13:17):
have a dream that comes true or whatever. Other people
think that only certain people have it, they have the
gift as they say, uh, and that they have to
be in this special like you know, mental state to
access it the shinn, yeah, the shinning. And then other
folks say that everyone has that potential, but some people
are just like in tune with it, and some people aren't.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Right, and you fall into none of those three camp Yes,
So we'll talk a little more about some ideas of
what ESP is right after this. So, Chuck, you said
(14:12):
that basically how people see ESP is either everyone has it,
some people have it, or no one has it. Basically,
whether you're a skeptic or a believer. If you are
a believer in ESP and somebody comes to you and says, okay,
explain ESP, like what is it, there's actually a couple
(14:34):
of very common suggestions or proposals.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
One made sense for a while before we knew a
little more about the brain, and that was that ESP
was some form or fashion of the electromagnetic spectrum that
we were receiving information from outside of our usual senses.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, And like you said, it fell out of favor
because basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves
through time or there. It didn't pick up on some
special part of your brain that receives this message.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
And there was a did you see that study I
sent you? That was I think from twenty ten where
they put people in an MRI and then showed them
different pictures or whatever, and they did they showed like,
I put you in the Wonder machine and now I'm
showing you a picture of the flower and that's it.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Okay, it's lovely, except it sounds like a German rave.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Okay, a little bit. But that would be the non
ESP stimuli the control group to test ESP and to
see if the brain reacted differently, and then to see
if there was a part of the brain that's picking
up on ESP, I would show you the flower, and
then in the other room, I would also show Emily
that flower, I think about it and send you the
(16:02):
thought of that flower. So you're getting ESP stimuli and
then non ESP stimuli. And from the MRI they showed
that the brain didn't react differently.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Gotcha.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
So it suggests that there isn't a sensory organ or
region of the brain that's responsible for picking up ESP,
which doesn't debunk the possibility of ESP. It just undermines
the idea that there's a region of our brain that
would be responsible for picking that up.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Plus, I Emily's over there, My first guess is gonna
be dog every time, and it's flower.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
And then well, it wasn't about guessing. It was just
to see, like showing you the ESP version, right, and
then the non ESP version of the same thing. So
you weren't guessing, do you understand?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, I get it. No, I would have guessed dog
or wine.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
There wasn't guessing, That's what I guessed.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Emily thinks she has a gift a little bit, so
she would have been disappointed. She's got the shin Yeah,
a little, she thinks. Yeah, But I think she is
just super observant and intuitive.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
But that's definitely one explanation for it.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, which we'll get to of course. So these days
there are other theories, one of which is that it's
called spillover, that there's basically another dimension that that doesn't
you know, have our laws here and our dimension, and
that sometimes stuff just sort of spills over from that
and we see the future or the past.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, And if you're a skeptic, you probably just pull
the decent size clump of your hair out of the
side of your head at that point.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, because this is something you can't prove obviously, it's
like completely and of course they'll say it exactly. Yeah,
you know.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah, And I think I got the impression from this
article that they were making that point, like science is
just chasing its tail and trying to explain ESP because
it's not currently capable and science goes doesn't work like that. Yeah,
you know, at least with the electromagnetic spectrum explanation, it
(18:04):
was pointing to something that we already know exists, right,
It's just that there's no way to show that we
would be getting how we would be getting information from it,
because that electromagnetic explanation, Yeah, it basically says if you
compare it to other findings from ESP, it makes even
(18:26):
less sense. Right, Because with ESP, one of the hallmarks
of it is that no matter whether you're out there
outside of the studio thinking about wine or a dog
or something and I'm picking up on it, or if
you're in China and I'm here and we're doing the
same thing, the signal doesn't weaken at all.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Yeah, And that just flies in the face of all
we know about electromagnetic.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Rights exactly, no good, right, So there's a lot of
things wrong with the proposals of what ESP is.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Yeah, but you know, the reason why still people still
believe in this stuff is because of either hearing a
story about their friend who said, you know, listen to
this crazy thing happened, or experiencing it themselves in some
way or another, having a dream that something similar happened,
and all of a sudden you're like, I might at
the gift exactly where it popped up in me, you know,
briefly at least.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
And there's a I mean, there's a lot of evidence
of a strange and unusual occurrences, sure that support the
idea of ESP.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
This article gives a really good one about an eighteen
ninety eight book called Futility.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah, that was.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Written by a guy named Morgan Robertson right, And in
it the guy details this book or this boat called.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
The titan Ship.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Yeah ship, the boat a big old boat, yeah, which
is sailing across the Atlantic and hits an iceberg at
night and sinks and a bunch of people die because
they weren't enough lifeboats.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
This is eighteen ninety eight and if that sounds familiar.
The Titanic did the same exact thing, the Titanic, not
the titan Yeah, did the same exact thing fourteen years later.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Yeah, if there are a bunch of similarities. The titan
struck an iceberg in the book on the starboard side
on an April night in the North Atlantic, off the
coast of Newfoundland, and the real Titanic struck an iceberg
on the starboard side in April in the North Atlantic,
off the coast of Newfoundland.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
And the starless night.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I don't know about that, Okay. They were both said
to be unsinkable. More than half of the passengers of
the Titanic perished, and more than half of the passengers
and crew on the titan perished. So there's all these
things in there. But you do a little more digging
and you find out that Robertson was he was a seaman,
(20:46):
and he knew a bunch of this stuff. And it's
not unreasonable to think at the time they wanted to
build the biggest ships, and the word titan would be
a great name back then for a super big ship, right,
And that sailing route was a common one, and there
were icebergs and April might have been a common month
for that kind of voyage, so all of it can
(21:08):
be explained away kind of. But it is definitely something
you look at and go, oh interesting.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
It is interesting and it's amazing coincidence, and it focuses
the attention and captures the imagination. But then, yeah, once
you hear about Robertson's background, it becomes slightly less impressive.
So then kind of too over the years that little
Colonel got erased and added to it was that this
(21:33):
idea for this book came to him in a trance,
which bolsters the.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Esp th Yeah, is that true or is that just
been added?
Speaker 1 (21:40):
I'm sure it was added over the years, Okay. Which
is a big problem with this kind of anecdotal evidence
is that you know, it gets embellished in urban Yeah, exactly.
And it's just it's not enough that this is a
really interesting, unique circumstance or coincidence or whatever. There has
to be this extra layer of proof, like it came
(22:03):
to him in a trance.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Come on. Yeah. So back to Ryan, he did some
like I said, in the nineteen thirties, he started studying
the stuff with one of my favorite inventions by his
colleague Carl Zenner. Of course, if you've seen Ghostbusters he
was using. He was using a version of Zenner cards.
The shapes weren't all exactly. I think there was one
(22:27):
that was different in Ghostbusters, but the original Xenner cards were.
It was a deck of twenty five plane white cards,
with each of them had one of five symbols a circle,
a plus sign, a square, a star, five pointed star,
and the three wavy lines.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Like water a river?
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Is that what that is?
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Maybe?
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Okay? And the idea is that, just like in Ghostbusters,
you hold it up and asked the you know, not
showing them the card at obviously not the symbol, and
say what do you see? And they say what they see?
And then you record after the deck how many they.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Got right, right, But the person holding the card is
supposed to be thinking about what they're seeing, sure, so
that the other person, the target, the receiver, can pick
it up telepathically.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, and I did they have these online. I took
the test yesterday and I went through the twenty five
deck and I only got six out of twenty five.
And at the end it just said you are not
a psychic.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Oh really?
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, I thought it was kind of funny.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Statistically speaking, for just one trial that is more than chance.
You did better than chance. So maybe you do have
a touch.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Six of what would chance be?
Speaker 1 (23:41):
I guess chance would be if there's five different ones.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
To be twenty percent, and so this was six of
twenty four would be it? No, that's less.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Yeah, No, you did six of twenty four. So you
did twenty four or twenty five twenty five, so five
of twenty five would be chance.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Okay, so I got one more? Yeah, well, and I
think like three of the first eight or so or
six I got And I was like.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Oh, I've got the gift, right, but I.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Didn't know, Like it's randomly generated, so it's not like
someone was on the other side thinking of that card.
So I literally I was like, what do I do?
I was like, I'm just guessing.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
So that brings up some interesting stuff, like there's there's
evidence that when a machine is involved, Yeah, there is
no telepathy. There would only be clairvoyance, right, yeah, So
I mean if telepathy is you picking up what's in
someone else's mind and a computer is mindless, then you
(24:42):
shouldn't be able what you were saying, like, you should
it shouldn't you should not be able to know what
zener card it's going to pick next, right, But there
have been investigations using computers and using machines that show
above chance, yeah, that there is some sort of weird interaction.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Like a random number generators.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Yes, yeah, So Princeton University has a department called the
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Department PAIR, right, of course, and
Pair has been doing studies for a couple of decades.
They've done millions of trials and basically they'll say, this
is a random number generator or this this machine operates
randomly or whatever. We want you to think of a number,
(25:24):
and we want to see if you can influence the
numbers that this computer spits out.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Oh so you're thinking of the number, then the you're okay.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
That makes like the human is trying to affect the computer,
the output the behavior of the computer. Of course, if
you're sitting across the room or in another room thinking
about a number that a random generator should put out,
it should have zero effect whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
It's a computer.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
The weird thing is is what Princeton has found is
that yes, over enough trials, you there is a slight
very slight but measurable effect that human has on a
random number generator. Come on, it's on Princeton's website. And
this is stuff that like is apparently accepted in the
in the scientific community that the trials that they are
(26:12):
running are so widespread and so repeatable and have been
done so many times that the data that they're coming
up with is it's significant.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Well, Ryan with his inner card experiments in the thirties
did find that some people got what they thought were
pretty impressive results, like you know a few I can't
remember their names, but Hubert Pierce was he one of them.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
He was the one how.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Many what was his percentage?
Speaker 1 (26:39):
He had one where he got remember how you got
three in a row and you were like, oh my god, Yeah,
he got twenty five in a row once? What twenty five?
Come on, No, I'm not kidding. He was also documented
as selecting five hundred and fifty eight correct out of
eighteen hundred and fifty which is the odds of that
happening by chain. Yeah, we're twenty two billion to one.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Now, were these the early experiments because okay, because I
did read that and this seems like I can't believe
he didn't check this, but apparently the early cards were
a little translucent. Oh really, yeah, some of them were.
And then he corrected for that and the and the
percentages went down. And then they, I know, other scientists
(27:23):
said that you are somehow influencing with your body tell right,
like you basically you don't have a good enough poker vase.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Yeah. In the earliest Ryan experiments with the xener cards,
he would hold the card up and go and he'd
be making eye contacts right the guy. Yeah, The guesser
would be like, is it the wavy line? Yeah, he
started shaking his head almost in perseent, but he uh he.
That's called sensory leakage, where you the person who is
(27:55):
holding the card and knows who the card is. Yeah,
somehow there's some detail about your face that when you
do a thousand trials with somebody, yeah, they start to
pick up on and it affects their guests. It influences
their guests. So to correct for that, to control for
that sensory leakage, that cross, Yeah, they they came up
(28:18):
with something called the gans Field experiment.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Ah. Yes, as a German gunsfeld that means whole field
in German, and that is when they started putting people,
they would start depriving their other senses. Basically, right, they
would be in a like a dimly lit room with
red lighting, and they would have white noise, and they
would have their eyes covered with these special glasses.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Or ping pong balls cut in half like Kermit the Frog.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
I guess later on they said, we should just make
some glasses.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Exactly, We've got the funding.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
So basically the idea was, let's rule out any uh
any of that gross sensory leakage.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Yeah, which he so apparently. Later on in Ryan's experiments,
after he started controlling for stuff, the percentages started to
drop of correct guesses. He was also he's generally a
respected researcher for a couple of reasons. One, whenever he
(29:22):
did whenever evidence of like some sort of bias or
fraud or something was brought to him, he corrected for it.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Yeah, he wore glasses and a white coat, right.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
That was another one. But also he was daring enough
to stake his entire career on a field of study
that will get anybody mocked publicly privately, can really shut
down a lot of opportunities for you. This guy and
his wife Louisa Ryan both dedicated their careers to establishing
(29:58):
the field of parapsychology and really studying it rather than
just walking away from it.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Yeah, I don't think he was like, I really want
to prove this is true?
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Was he?
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yes, he did that.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
That was a huge criticism of him. He got you
was a definite believer. He was quoted by I don't
know what the guy's steal was, but one day he
was visited by one person and the interviewer who went
on to write a paper I think in Scientific American
to expose him. He said he kept a file of
(30:32):
people of the results of tests where people he suspected
were purposefully getting things wrong because they didn't like him
to mess with his data. He just took those and
never published them. He didn't include him in the results,
which would definitely affect the number of correct hits.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
That was a huge criticism. That's not good science at all.
But he was definitely a believer, which was another criticism.
But he was daring and he did. There was another
story where it's called the Levy affair, where a guy
named Levy, who was an electrical engineer working in the
lab unplugged I guess the sensor that would correct negative
(31:16):
hits for a little while during a trial, so that
all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits,
and then he plugged it back in. Well, this one
guy saw what the guy was doing and went to Ryan,
and Ryan went to the guy Levy and said, did
you do this? And Levy said yes, he's like you're fired,
and just like threw the results away and all that.
So he wasn't like he was a true believer, but
(31:37):
he wasn't just some like outright fraud right right, But
he was and still is under the microscope as much
as probably any researcher in all of academia ever has been.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
All right, Well, right after this break, we'll talk a
little bit about what skeptics say about ESB. All right, Josh.
(32:10):
One thing you'll hear skeptics say a lot is extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence. And I have to agree with them. Yeah,
And it is an extraordinary claim here, and so far
there hasn't been extraordinary evidence. And one of the things
I pointed to earlier that I think is what's going
on if you look at statistics, you look at six
(32:32):
billion people on planet Earth and them thinking a gazillion
things each day, and that is scientific, by the way, gazillion.
At some point somebody is going to think something that
mirrors something that happens in the near future, and it's
just chance and coincidence.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
I have a great example of that, man. Okay, it
happened this very morning. What yeah, I did. I was
at the printer. You know, we just moved offices, and
I was at the printer and I had like an
extra pizza paper that I didn't need, and I realized, like,
we have no paper recycling here.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
So on my way back yet that is everyone out
there is like, what kind of office would I.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Right, we just said we have a fifty five gallon
drum that we throw stuff into that it catches on fire.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, and then we send it out.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
We have a burning drum, that's what it's called.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Now we're getting those soon.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Right, And we are getting them soon. I know this
because on my way back to my desk, I popped
into Izzy, the it guy who's also the head of
all recycling and stuff here. I was like, Izzy, we
need a paper recycling bins by the printer, and he goes,
I'm writing an email right now to everybody about that
very thing.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
You almost did your Izzy impression.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, it was close, and so, like I thought about it,
that's pretty amazing. Yeah, you know, but it was about
nine in the morning, and this is a company wide email,
so it would be something that Izzy would probably knock
out about that time.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
The reason I was thinking of is because I was
just at the printer. We just moved into this office
and we didn't have bins yet, so it was still
a potential thing for somebody to be thinking about or
doing or writing an email about. And so there's all
these different, really overlooked variables or factors to this whole
thing that you don't think of. Instead, it just seems
(34:21):
like an amazing coincidence or ESP. To me, the really
significant thing was that I happened to be researching ESP
while this happened. That's what really kind of stood out
to me. But if you really kind of look at it,
like there's a finite amount of things that people could
think about in any given day, in any given context
in an office or something like that, Like had I
(34:44):
been a goat at a petting zoo and I went
over and talked to the cow and the cow was
writing the email about recycling bins. Maybe, but we're in
an office. I'm talking to the guy about recycling bins.
There's just a lot of stuff that you kind of
Once you take that into account, it becomes less amazing,
(35:04):
Like like the guy writing the Titan Titanic book.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, you know what used to happen to me now
that I think of it is I used to and
this it's weird. It was only with phone landlines. It
hadn't happened with the cell phone. But I used to
like know the phone was going to ring right before
it rang. Oh yeah, like almost go to reach for it.
And I mean it's not like it happened all the time,
but it happened enough times where I was like, oh,
(35:27):
that's weird.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Sure, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
But that was all it was to me. I was
not like I have the gift.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Well think about it in that respect too. You know
fifteen twenty people. So was it you knew who was
calling or just that the phone was about.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
To run now just that it was about to ring.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Oh yeah, that is weird. You definitely do have.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Esp yeah, or maybe I don't know, maybe the phone
made a little tick noise right before it rang that
I didn't pick up on. Yeah, but only subconsciously, you know.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Well, that's another explanation for it. That, right, that there
is subliminal stuff in the environment that is just too
weak in nature for us to pick up on consciously,
but our unconscious does or subconscious does, which frankly opens
up a whole other can of worms. You know, as
(36:18):
far as you know, how real is that kind of
thing there, But probably a little closer to reality is
the idea that our attention isn't focused on everything that
we're picking up at all times, like like I see
your beard, and I see your shirt and everything, but
I'm still also picking up like sensory information from like
Jerry's computer that I can see in my peripheral vision
(36:40):
or whatever. My attention isn't focused on it, but my
brain is still receiving information. So the idea that our
brains can put it together all this information that we're
not aware consciously that we're receiving, but we're still getting
impressions from it. That's that could be a great explanation
for esp as well.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, and you know what now to think about it,
The fact that it's never happened with my cell phone.
Sort of makes sense because maybe there it was a
mechanical function a landline.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Right, Yeah, like you said a click or a tick,
But yeah, I think you meant like a click.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
And it wasn't even the newer model. This was back
in the day when it was yeah, a ringing like bell. Sure,
so maybe that does explain it.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah. I've got another good example that I came across
from researching this. Let's say that you and I are
hanging out, yeah, and you're humming a Baby on the
fire work, right, just over and over again. I don't
know that song, but I'm reading Yes you do, No,
I don't, Yeah you do it? Was it Katy Perry?
I don't know Katy Perry anyway.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Although I will have to say I did love that
halftime show. It was great, well it was. It was hysterical.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
What's up with the sharks being a meme? Now?
Speaker 2 (37:51):
It was thin?
Speaker 1 (37:52):
They were really significant.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
She looked like she worked at corn Dog on a Stick.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
I don't know what that is that' thought all corn
dogs are on sticks.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
It's that place in the Hot Dog on a stick,
that place in the mall where they were those big
giant Yeah. No, I don't know anything about Katy Perry,
but it was the funniest most Like the crazy just
kept coming and coming, and I was like, this is
the best thing I've ever seen. So anyway, in.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
This universe, you're well aware of Katy Perry and her
song Firework, and you're humming it to yourself. But I'm
sitting there reading the New Yorker and I'm engrossed in it,
and I don't notice that you get up to go
make some nachos, and you come back in, and you
catch my attention because you're coming back in with some
nachos and they smell awesome, And now my attention is
(38:37):
directed to you, and you're still humming Firework right right,
And I'm like, I was just thinking about that song Firework.
I had that in my head. How crazy we must
be connected. I didn't realize that you had been humming
it earlier, and beneath my awareness I picked it up.
Although once I became aware that you were humming it,
it seemed to me like I had well.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Yeah, And that ties into another explanation is that people
who do seem to have that gift are just really,
really hyper observant on minute details. Like the same people
that can pick up on micro expressions. They might feel
like they have the gift because they're just really in
tune to what's going on around them or not just
like a big lunkhead walking around.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
So a lot of people who believe in ESP say, yes,
we agree with that, especially parapsychology researchers, and there are
still plenty of respected ones out there. There's a guy
named Darryl Bem.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Yeah, I saw that thing you sent. He's been doing
this for a while now.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Yeah, legitimately we should talk about him. But to button
up that point, there is a lot of parapsychologists or
even just plain old psychologists who are researching ESP, yeah,
who say, yes, that definitely most likely accounts for almost
all of it, and that's good for us to be
(39:59):
thinking about that, and that in and of it self
deserves like academic inquiry and research. Right. Yeah, But there
are still some experience experiments that are being produced by
guys like Daryl Bem that are showing some weird results
that go beyond this kind of explanation.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Yeah. And one of the problems, well, we'll talk about
the problems with even this research about it being reproducible
in a second. But he did a couple of experiments.
This is from NPR.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Akroll which wrote this. Oh really, yeah, from from from
Radio Lab.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Nice. I didn't know that these are the two that
he pointed out. He did nine different experiments, but the
two that he highlighted was at Cornell, which is where
bim is A does his work, right.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
Yeah, and he's again a very respected psychologist. And this study,
that of these experiments was published in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, which is a respected journal.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Yeah. So they The first one was a computer quiz.
They took a hundred student it's fifty males and fifty women,
and basically they showed a computer screen with two little
curtains on it, side by side and said behind one
is nothing a brick wall, and behind the other is
something sexy. Yeah, some kind of you know, I was
(41:19):
about to call it pornographic, but who knows. Maybe it's
art nakednessism.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
Yeah, gross, This just make you feel like your dad
saying it or something.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yeah, well, this room's too small for you to say.
So basically he would say, you tell me what you
think you're going to see, and they were all hooked
up two machines to read the you know, they're what's
going on in their body, of course, and you would
think it would be a fifty to fifty result, but
they actually got a fifty three point one percent result
(41:54):
for the what uh Crawlwitch calls erotic stimuli. And basically
they they think, or at least that's what Bem thinks,
is that one possibility is that if there is if
they think they're going to see something erotically stimulating, then
(42:15):
it got passed back through time.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Yeah, that's kind of his position, is that retrocognition thing. Yeah,
that they somehow their future selves who saw the erotic
image was stimulated enough that that stimulation traveled backwards three
seconds and influenced their choice.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Because they were they would be slightly stimulated physiologically right
before they guess. And he said, before the computer even
chose which which one to.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Show, right, they right, they were making their choices often correct,
before the computer chose to show an erotic or non
erotic image. And fifty three percent it doesn't sound like much,
but Krolwitch points out a couple of things. One that
when there was a control group that was shown non
eurotic pictures. Yeah, they did forty nine point eight percent correct,
(43:04):
which is chance.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
And they're fifty to fifty and they're all not happy, right,
They're like, I don't want to be the control.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
They're like, can we get a little steamier in here?
But and he also pointed out that fifty three fifty
three point one, to be specific, doesn't sound like much,
but apparently that's a point two percent chance where on
a scale between zero and one, where zero is it's
(43:32):
not going to happen, and one is that it's definitely
gonna happen. Yeah, And apparently, as far as correlation goes,
or links between two things something affecting another, a point
two is about the same as the link between aspirin
and heart attack prevention, the link between calcium intake and
(43:52):
bone mass, the link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
So things that are touted is like, pay attention to.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
This, yesh, yeah, yeah exactly. So stuff that we accept
is like, yeah, yeah, if you're around second and smoke,
you can get cancer from that. This is probably has
the same exactly, yeah it is. And later on a
meta analysis of Bem's experiments, some other experiments that were
carried out afterward, and then some other experiments all grouped
(44:20):
together a meta analysis showed that they weren't. It wasn't
statistically significant if you took all of the existing body
of literature of these experiments. But it was a New
Scientist article and it was pretty cool. In the comment section,
somebody said, yeah, it's not reproducible, but a lot of
(44:44):
science isn't reproducible, And it reminded me of our scientific
method episode, Yeah, where like apparently a lot of trials
that like pharmaceuticals are based on aren't reproducible. Wasn't it
like fifty percent of them?
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Yeah, which doesn't surprise me of course.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
All right, And then there was this other experiment that
I need you to explain to me because I didn't
understand it. Okay, you're ready, Like I got the first part,
but I didn't. It didn't make sense to.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Me because it's a little mind blowing.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
So you know how like if you are studying something, sure,
and you write it down, Yes, it gets in your
brain a little more.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Yeah, so that when you're tested on it later, you
will recall it more easily.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Yeah, that's a common study method. Write something down okay.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
So Bem carried out a very simple experiment that did
the opposite of that. First, he showed some people a
bunch of a bunch of words, forty eight random words
I think noun's like tree or something like that.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah, and he told them to visualize it though, right.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Right, So they saw all forty eight words and thought about.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
Them, not visualized the letters, but visualized the thing, right,
like see the tree and.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
You're yeah, just just to kind of try to memorize
all forty eight words.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Then the computer randomly selected twenty four of those words,
and then after they'd done that, Bem gave them a
test of recall to see how many they recalled, right, Yes,
So the people had to type out the words they recalled.
Then after that, the computer randomly selected twenty four of
(46:15):
the forty eight words for the people to type after
they'd already taken the test of recall. And those twenty
four words are the ones that people more consistently got
right on the earlier tests.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Oh okay, So.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
It's another example of that retrocognition that these people getting
the words in their heads after the test somehow went
backward and influenced their recall and memory. Gocha for the
test that they took before they learned them.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
That makes more sense a little. Yeah, it is a little,
but see time travel melts my brain too. Right.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
So this guy published this stuff in like twenty ten,
and like it was, it made a huge, huge splash,
huge criticism. The Act Demic Journal was criticized and bem
was you know, pillar eat and all that. But he's
still you know, put out these these very reproducible, understandable,
simple exercises that still showed statistically speaking, there were some
(47:15):
significant results that went beyond chance.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
So when it comes to debunking ESP one thing that
you're not gonna you know, you said fraud, You're not
going to see a lot of people call researchers outright
frauds because that's just sort of a dangerous thing to say. Sure,
it's not nice, but there are people out there who
I guess are criticized for, you know, basically trying to
(47:39):
call out and this is something completely different. But these
these on stage psychic.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
Shows like crossing Over with John Edwards.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
Yeah, like it's easy to pick those people out and
say you're a big fraud and this is not true
of course, and all you're doing is cold reading. Cold
reading we talked about in the Animal Pet Psychics episode, Right,
that's basically when you get up on stage and you say, sir,
I'm sensing someone there. You're having some trouble with another
(48:08):
man in your life with a name of j or
or is it h or O P or maybe it's P.
Yes P, my boss Peter. Yes, yes, exactly. And that's
all a could reading is. It's throwing out these really
broad things that anyone can latch onto. So it's really
easy to call those people out. And there's a guy,
(48:30):
sort of a guy famous for doing that. His name
is James Randy, and he's famous for his offer of
one million dollars to anyone that can prove their psychic ability,
which of course no one stepped up to do that.
But then he gets poop pooed a little bit, like
you're just making a mockery of trying to legitimately disprove something.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
And mockery is absolutely the right word. Yeah, And to me,
the presence of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
So like what you're dealing with then, with a guy
like that, is a set of beliefs a belief system
running up against another belief system, just like a couple
of religions or something like that. It's not objectivity against
fraud or anything like that. It's belief against belief or something.
And yeah, the idea of lumping together John Edwards with
(49:24):
Darryl bem is just that's, you know, fraudulent in and
of itself.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
Yeah, that's just they call that theatrics, just like the
on stage theatrics of a stage psychic. Yeah, so I
totally agree.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Yeah, you know, I do too. I think there's a
definite room for a healthy scientific inquiry into just about anything,
whether skeptics believe in it or not.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
Sure, if you can get some funding for it, who cares.
That's my motto.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
You got anything else on ESP, let me think. No,
I've got one more thing I found. I came across
the nineteen ninety i think five Nightline with Ted Copple, Yeah,
where the news broke that the CIA had been studying
ESP and trying to do remote viewing what Ronson was
(50:14):
talking about and the men who stare at goats?
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Oh yeah, John.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
When it finally became declassified in nineteen ninety five, Ted
Copple did like a twenty minute Nightline segment on it.
Totally worth watching. It's some pretty softball questions.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:28):
Robert Gates, who would later become the head of Defense. Yeah,
he's on there just basically trying as politely as possible
to show that he does not believe in any of this,
even though he was the Formacia director. And it's just neat.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
Plus you get to watch Copple again, right, he was
great news man. Yeah, I miss those dudes. I miss
I was just thinking yesterday about Brokaw.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Yeah, rather I was.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
I was always a Brokaw man.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Did you I liked Peter Jennings he was great.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
I don't even know all of them were great.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
I don't even have any idea who does nightly news
now I don't watch it.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
It was Brian Williams until about a day ago.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
Did he get fired? He like got I know, the
whole kerfuffle, but he didn't get fired for it.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
Did. I'm using my esp to predict that by the
time this came this comes out, who will not be
there anymore? Wow, I think this is getting big quick interesting.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
Yeah. Twitter's involved, man, the Twitter takedown.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Yeah. Uh. If you want to know more about ESP.
The internet was virtually set up for you to go
find out more about it. You can start by typing
ESP in the search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com. Since
I said that it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
Yeah, before we do listener mail, I just want to
give a quick shout out to my buddy Isaac McNairy.
If you remember, I did a Judge John Hodgman episode
with Emily in which I did a bad home renovation
and this dude stuff you should know. Listener from Kansas
carpenter Master Carpenter said hey, man, I'll come and stay
with you and help you do your your project there
(52:03):
right And I said this sounds crazy, and he actually
came and did it and it looks awesome and he's
a super cool guy. And if you're in Kansas near Eldoredo, Kansas,
there's no better guy to hire, El Dorados. It's El Daredo. Actually, Okay,
he has to point out, but not only is he
a great carpenter and a cool guy, but he works
(52:24):
with a nonprofit called Outreach Program And you can find
it an Outreach Program dot org where they're basically feeding
the world. They package food and they get people together
in a room and package these mass quantities of food
to send to other countries and feed the hungry. And
he's just a really good dude. So thanks to Isaac
(52:46):
for that. And my kitchen list is looking good. So
again for his nonprofit that is Outreach Program dot org.
And if you need a great carpenter and you're in Kansas,
check out retro Fit Remodeling.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
All right, listener mail to call this pronunciation help. Hey guys,
I'm a botanist and just wanted to throw throw you
a rope to help you out with pronouncing plant family names.
All plant family names end in A C.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
E A E. Oh yeah, I thought I got that wrong.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
It is a mess of vowels. Guys. When you read it,
you should just imagine you were spelling ace as in acee.
So when you read a plant family name, just break
off A the acee and read the first part and
then spell acee. So the plant family for poison oak
is Anacardia anacardi a ce. So it's just Anna cardi
(53:41):
a ce. I remember it by imagining the aneurysm and
cardiac arrest I would have if I fell into it
A N A C A R D I what well
she spelled out anna CARDI, Oh gotcha the first two
first letters from each of those words. Anyway, guys, I
(54:01):
love your podcast. Find it endearing when you two puzzle
out on pronunciations.
Speaker 1 (54:05):
Ace A, see, that's good to know.
Speaker 2 (54:08):
Yeah, so I love you, bunches and that is from Jane,
and she said ps. In Europe they pronounce plant families
completely differently other parts of see. Other parts of the
US might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is
standard in California.
Speaker 1 (54:24):
Oh well, okay, what ac ac If you want to
let us know something that we should have known before
we even recorded, but you're generous enough with your time
and effort to correct us, I guess there's a way
to put it. Sure we That was very helpful. Thanks
(54:45):
a lot, Jane. If you want to be like Jane
in other words, you can send us an email to
Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey guys, it's Josh and for this week's select, I've
chosen our twenty fifteen episode on ESP. It's a really
good one. We talk about all sorts of things about ESP,
including the science, and I know what you're thinking. You're
thinking science and ESP. Yes, indeed, and that's one of
the things that makes this episode so cool. So I
(00:20):
hope you will open your mind, tune in, turn on,
drop out, keep on trucking, and enjoy this episode.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there. I didn't
even have to look why, I just knew.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yes, and dudes and dudets. We are in our new studio.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yeah, can you tell its own different.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
It's the very first one and it's tiny.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Wait what do you mean it's the very first one.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Very very first podcast that we've recorded in here.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Oh gotcha?
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say. I said tiny, but
it's not tiny. It's cozy, but it is all all ours, Yeah,
al ours.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Everybody else at House Stuff Works doesn't really know that yet,
but they will.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah. Because when we actually have butt detection and when
someone sits down in these seats that aren't us to
get a shock.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah. And plus an alarm goes off at our desks.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, what's it called dmr TM? I how are you, sir?
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I'm pretty good.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I feel like this is fancy. This is our first
real like studio. That's not true.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
No, I'm trying to remember. The last one was.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
No, but it's not a utility closet. It's not a
lactation room. It's not Yeah, it's not a murder room.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
It's not like an office with like desk for like
office furniture. Yeah, it's a it's a studio that was
built out for the specific purpose of recording podcasts.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yep. All we have to do is put up our
Aaron Cooper originals. The artwork, got a couple of those
waiting together, and we got to work on the lighting
in here a little bit.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Jerry's said she's gonna hang some china balls for us. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
She keeps pushing the china balls.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So anyway, enough about that. We just wanted to say
we're super excited to be in our new office, in
our new studio.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
It does feel good. Yeah, kudos for that intro. I'm
not going to say that. I knew you were going
to say that.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, I was going to say that too.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
I knew that you were thinking of saying that, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yes, ESP.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Do you believe in ESP?
Speaker 2 (02:44):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
No, not at all. Do you what do you think
it is? Because surely, I mean, just about anyone could
agree that humans have some sort of ability somehow to
make good guesses or to predict the future, or whatever
you want to call it. Do you agree or do
you think it's strictly just us selectively paying attention to
(03:07):
random instances over others.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
I think it's that, and as we'll talk about, I
think it's the just the nature of coincidence is going
to happen because so many things happen every day that
something is bound to seem like something you dreamed about
the night before at some point in your life.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
But the other millions of dreams you have that, don't
I think those are the ones that are the the
tell you know? Do you?
Speaker 1 (03:41):
I don't know? Like I want to. I spent so
many years of my life believing in stuff like that, Yeah,
and wanting to go to Duke University to study at
their parapsychology department. Did you really believe? Yeah, but you know,
believing in ghosts and all this and just that's how
I spent my childhood just reading about stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Very so Ghostbusters really did a number on you.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. When that came along, I was like
this for me, Yeah, but as an adult, it's not
so much that I believe in ESP. It's more that
I I refuse to just utterly disbelieve in the possibility
of it. Sure, okay, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Yeah, I got you there, because we don't know everything
about everything yet, right, but uh yeah, I'm in the
I'm the other camp. And I'm not even gonna say
the sceptic camp because those people just plug me.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Has a bad name, some due to some bad apples.
Not all skeptics, No, but there are some that are
horses asses. Can we say that?
Speaker 2 (04:46):
I don't know. We'll find out, all right, Well, let's
talk about And I thought this was interesting because I
never knew that ESP is just a big collective term
for all manner of par paranormal phenomena. You could also
call PSI.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah, and so a dude named jb Ryan who will
talk about later.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
He coined ESP the Granddaddy.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
And then in the forties another guy coined the term
PSI and PSI is a Greek letter and it's equated
with psyche or the soul ps i. And the reason
that the guy chose PI is because he felt ESP
suggested it was something supernatural. Yeah, sure, and SI he
felt suggested that this is a normal part of humanity.
(05:30):
We just don't understand it.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
It sounds like science, right. But there are several categories
of ESP, and this is the one that I never
knew the actual definitions for these. I sort of just
threw them all in a bag together. You have telepathy,
and that's when you can you know, you're over there
reading my thoughts. Yes, like Chuck is really not happy
to be in the new studio.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
That's not true.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
He'd rather be at home on the couch.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
I'm reading your thoughts right now, and I know that
you like this place.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Okay, Well, you're a telep right. Clairvoyance, which is the
ability to see events or things objects happening somewhere else
at the same time. So are you doing are you clairvoyant?
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I am. I'm seeing your couch right now and I'm
seeing it's not that comfy. Yeah, so you're not missing
that much at the moment.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
I know somewhere Jonathan Strickland is waxing his head, bald head.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
That's just a logical assumption.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Okay. Then we have our pre cogs precognition, that's when
you see into the future, retrocogs retro cognition. You can
see into the distant past.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
That's there's another that's a widely accepted definition of retrocognition. Yeah,
like seeing you know, cave like TikTok running around with
the dinosaurs like you do, which I guess never would
have happened. Yeah, But there's another term for retrocognition, whereas
something in the future affects something in the past. So
a decision you make in the future, yeah, affects your past.
(06:57):
And an example given is that you have a dream
about a dinosaur. Now, let's say a spotted dog, okay,
and then the first thing the next morning, you go
outside to water your lawn and this same spotted dog
or a similar spotted dog walks by. The idea isn't
that that was very coincidental or that you had esp
(07:18):
in your dreams, Yeah, but that you seeing that dog
in the morning affected your dream the night before. Oh okay,
so that's another definition that's emerging for retrocognition. That's getting
a lot of traction because of the stuff we're finding
on the quantum scale, just weirdness like that.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
All right. Then you have your mediumship and that's miss
Cleo who can channel dead spirits.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Yeah, I forgot about her.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
And then you heard.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
How much money that woman grossed in the nineties.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
She made a lot of dough, I hope. So yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Mean she was working hard. She had a finite window
of opportunity, and she worked that whole time. She didn't
like buy a sailboat and sail around the world after
like first million. You know, like she worked.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
So you're not in the camp of like she's taking
people's money and taking advantage of people.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
I see that argument, sure, for sure. I also see
like if people want to spend their money on that
and they get something out of it, knock yourself out.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
All right. And then you have a psychometry, which is
the ability to read info about a person place by
touching the person no object. And that's what I like
to call the dead zone. Right, Christopher Walkin, he would
place his hands on you and he would see something.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Man. I think we talked about it recently about how
that movie holds up. Still. Yeah, that is such a
good movie.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Yeah, it really is good, Chris Walkin.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
There's another one, Chuck called telekinesis, which is like Uri
Geller stroking a spoon in it bending right, like being
able to manipulate matter just using a light touch of
your mind.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
But there is no spoon. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Wasn't that from Matrix?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
All right? So basically, like you said, jb Ryan is
the granddaddy of all this, and he actually started studying.
I mean, he was a legitimate scientist. He wasn't some quack.
And this was in the nineteen thirties where he started
at Duke University studying para parapsychology basically.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
And he wasn't the first. He was one of the
first laboratory experimenters in academia to really study SAI. Right
before him, probably about forty or so years before him,
William James and some of his pals at the Society
for Psychical Research really laid the groundwork for applying the
scientific method to the study of paranormal phenomenonah, and they
(09:49):
did two things. They outed frauds, like fraudulent mediums, like
very famously Madame Bleovartsky. But then they also investigated ones
like the reach them typically with like an open mind. Yeah,
and if they found somebody that they just couldn't explain,
they would they studied them. So they were they were
(10:09):
studying each one with an open mind. And the ones
they figured out were frauds they outed as frauds. The
ones they figured out it couldn't quite explain. Yeah, they
sought to investigate scientifically rather than just saying, oh, they're
frauds somehow, right, So that was the groundwork of the
study of cy.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
What was Madame Blevartsky Steele of the Cony?
Speaker 1 (10:30):
She was she actually she was almost a cult leader,
you could argue she was. She she created Oh man,
it's called like theodism, I think, huh, which is it was?
It was almost a cult. It was a huge movement
in the nineteenth century where like you go to like
(10:53):
a seance and there was a medium there and they
would channel like the spirits of the dead relatives of
people who were there, holding hands in the circle and
stuff like that. And she gained a lot of power
and wealth and prestige until she was outed as a fraud.
And I don't remember the the it's theosophy, that's what
it is. Theoism. Theoism has to do with theo Huxtable.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Did you see The Source Family, by the way, that documentary. No,
I haven't about the La cult in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
I saw the icon on Netflix and never clicked as a.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Good it's really good and it's it's awesome. Actually, I
recommend everyone see. It's one of those where they interview
a lot of them today and they weren't like, you know,
they didn't commit suicide like everyone was like, it was
pretty great.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
They're all fine. They're all just a bunch of hippies.
Still they were out in La Yeah, yeah, right in Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
There was one in There was a documentary I saw
about a cult in Miami and they were like super
fundamentalist Christian but they also were the basis of their
religion was formed on pot too.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Well, that's what the Source Family was.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I wonder if they were related.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Well, it was the seventies. Yeah, there were a lot
of pot cults, I bet.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
But did they turn into like huge pot dealers.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
No, I don't think so this cult did. They had
a band though, and.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
The called the Source M.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
You know, I can't remember the name of the band,
but it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
To Manhattan Transfer.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah, that was. It's a really good documentary that it's
just funny to see how these people now they're like,
it was awesome. Yeah, I had a lot of sex
and smoked a lot of weed.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, that's kind of what got hurt too. They these
guys didn't seem to have a lot of sex though.
They were like real like compartmentalized gender wise, like male
dominance and all that. But they just smoked a ton
of pot all the time, including their little kids. Oh well,
that's not good, like like four year old smoking.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Oh that's terrible.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah, it was in the documentary. It's worse seeing I
don't remember what you.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Had me up. You lost me there.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
I lost everybody there in that documentary.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah. All right, So back to this ESP thing. Jb
Ryan Yeah, jb Ryan, Well, basically, there's a there's a
lot of different outlooks on what ESP might be. Some
people think that everyone's got it, but some people it
just pops up every now and then, like I might
(13:17):
have a dream that comes true or whatever. Other people
think that only certain people have it, they have the
gift as they say, uh, and that they have to
be in this special like you know, mental state to
access it the shinn, yeah, the shinning. And then other
folks say that everyone has that potential, but some people
are just like in tune with it, and some people aren't.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Right, and you fall into none of those three camp Yes,
So we'll talk a little more about some ideas of
what ESP is right after this. So, Chuck, you said
(14:12):
that basically how people see ESP is either everyone has it,
some people have it, or no one has it. Basically,
whether you're a skeptic or a believer. If you are
a believer in ESP and somebody comes to you and says, okay,
explain ESP, like what is it, there's actually a couple
(14:34):
of very common suggestions or proposals.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
One made sense for a while before we knew a
little more about the brain, and that was that ESP
was some form or fashion of the electromagnetic spectrum that
we were receiving information from outside of our usual senses.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, And like you said, it fell out of favor
because basically it didn't explain anything about how it moves
through time or there. It didn't pick up on some
special part of your brain that receives this message.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
And there was a did you see that study I
sent you? That was I think from twenty ten where
they put people in an MRI and then showed them
different pictures or whatever, and they did they showed like,
I put you in the Wonder machine and now I'm
showing you a picture of the flower and that's it.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Okay, it's lovely, except it sounds like a German rave.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Okay, a little bit. But that would be the non
ESP stimuli the control group to test ESP and to
see if the brain reacted differently, and then to see
if there was a part of the brain that's picking
up on ESP, I would show you the flower, and
then in the other room, I would also show Emily
that flower, I think about it and send you the
(16:02):
thought of that flower. So you're getting ESP stimuli and
then non ESP stimuli. And from the MRI they showed
that the brain didn't react differently.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Gotcha.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
So it suggests that there isn't a sensory organ or
region of the brain that's responsible for picking up ESP,
which doesn't debunk the possibility of ESP. It just undermines
the idea that there's a region of our brain that
would be responsible for picking that up.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Plus, I Emily's over there, My first guess is gonna
be dog every time, and it's flower.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
And then well, it wasn't about guessing. It was just
to see, like showing you the ESP version, right, and
then the non ESP version of the same thing. So
you weren't guessing, do you understand?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, I get it. No, I would have guessed dog
or wine.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
There wasn't guessing, That's what I guessed.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Emily thinks she has a gift a little bit, so
she would have been disappointed. She's got the shin Yeah,
a little, she thinks. Yeah, But I think she is
just super observant and intuitive.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
But that's definitely one explanation for it.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, which we'll get to of course. So these days
there are other theories, one of which is that it's
called spillover, that there's basically another dimension that that doesn't
you know, have our laws here and our dimension, and
that sometimes stuff just sort of spills over from that
and we see the future or the past.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, And if you're a skeptic, you probably just pull
the decent size clump of your hair out of the
side of your head at that point.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, because this is something you can't prove obviously, it's
like completely and of course they'll say it exactly. Yeah,
you know.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah, And I think I got the impression from this
article that they were making that point, like science is
just chasing its tail and trying to explain ESP because
it's not currently capable and science goes doesn't work like that. Yeah,
you know, at least with the electromagnetic spectrum explanation, it
(18:04):
was pointing to something that we already know exists, right,
It's just that there's no way to show that we
would be getting how we would be getting information from it,
because that electromagnetic explanation, Yeah, it basically says if you
compare it to other findings from ESP, it makes even
(18:26):
less sense. Right, Because with ESP, one of the hallmarks
of it is that no matter whether you're out there
outside of the studio thinking about wine or a dog
or something and I'm picking up on it, or if
you're in China and I'm here and we're doing the
same thing, the signal doesn't weaken at all.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Yeah, And that just flies in the face of all
we know about electromagnetic.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Rights exactly, no good, right, So there's a lot of
things wrong with the proposals of what ESP is.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Yeah, but you know, the reason why still people still
believe in this stuff is because of either hearing a
story about their friend who said, you know, listen to
this crazy thing happened, or experiencing it themselves in some
way or another, having a dream that something similar happened,
and all of a sudden you're like, I might at
the gift exactly where it popped up in me, you know,
briefly at least.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
And there's a I mean, there's a lot of evidence
of a strange and unusual occurrences, sure that support the
idea of ESP.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
This article gives a really good one about an eighteen
ninety eight book called Futility.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah, that was.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Written by a guy named Morgan Robertson right, And in
it the guy details this book or this boat called.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
The titan Ship.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Yeah ship, the boat a big old boat, yeah, which
is sailing across the Atlantic and hits an iceberg at
night and sinks and a bunch of people die because
they weren't enough lifeboats.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
This is eighteen ninety eight and if that sounds familiar.
The Titanic did the same exact thing, the Titanic, not
the titan Yeah, did the same exact thing fourteen years later.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Yeah, if there are a bunch of similarities. The titan
struck an iceberg in the book on the starboard side
on an April night in the North Atlantic, off the
coast of Newfoundland, and the real Titanic struck an iceberg
on the starboard side in April in the North Atlantic,
off the coast of Newfoundland.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
And the starless night.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I don't know about that, Okay. They were both said
to be unsinkable. More than half of the passengers of
the Titanic perished, and more than half of the passengers
and crew on the titan perished. So there's all these
things in there. But you do a little more digging
and you find out that Robertson was he was a seaman,
(20:46):
and he knew a bunch of this stuff. And it's
not unreasonable to think at the time they wanted to
build the biggest ships, and the word titan would be
a great name back then for a super big ship, right,
And that sailing route was a common one, and there
were icebergs and April might have been a common month
for that kind of voyage, so all of it can
(21:08):
be explained away kind of. But it is definitely something
you look at and go, oh interesting.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
It is interesting and it's amazing coincidence, and it focuses
the attention and captures the imagination. But then, yeah, once
you hear about Robertson's background, it becomes slightly less impressive.
So then kind of too over the years that little
Colonel got erased and added to it was that this
(21:33):
idea for this book came to him in a trance,
which bolsters the.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Esp th Yeah, is that true or is that just
been added?
Speaker 1 (21:40):
I'm sure it was added over the years, Okay. Which
is a big problem with this kind of anecdotal evidence
is that you know, it gets embellished in urban Yeah, exactly.
And it's just it's not enough that this is a
really interesting, unique circumstance or coincidence or whatever. There has
to be this extra layer of proof, like it came
(22:03):
to him in a trance.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Come on. Yeah. So back to Ryan, he did some
like I said, in the nineteen thirties, he started studying
the stuff with one of my favorite inventions by his
colleague Carl Zenner. Of course, if you've seen Ghostbusters he
was using. He was using a version of Zenner cards.
The shapes weren't all exactly. I think there was one
(22:27):
that was different in Ghostbusters, but the original Xenner cards were.
It was a deck of twenty five plane white cards,
with each of them had one of five symbols a circle,
a plus sign, a square, a star, five pointed star,
and the three wavy lines.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Like water a river?
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Is that what that is?
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Maybe?
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Okay? And the idea is that, just like in Ghostbusters,
you hold it up and asked the you know, not
showing them the card at obviously not the symbol, and
say what do you see? And they say what they see?
And then you record after the deck how many they.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Got right, right, But the person holding the card is
supposed to be thinking about what they're seeing, sure, so
that the other person, the target, the receiver, can pick
it up telepathically.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, and I did they have these online. I took
the test yesterday and I went through the twenty five
deck and I only got six out of twenty five.
And at the end it just said you are not
a psychic.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Oh really?
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Yeah, I thought it was kind of funny.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Statistically speaking, for just one trial that is more than chance.
You did better than chance. So maybe you do have
a touch.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Six of what would chance be?
Speaker 1 (23:41):
I guess chance would be if there's five different ones.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
To be twenty percent, and so this was six of
twenty four would be it? No, that's less.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Yeah, No, you did six of twenty four. So you
did twenty four or twenty five twenty five, so five
of twenty five would be chance.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Okay, so I got one more? Yeah, well, and I
think like three of the first eight or so or
six I got And I was like.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Oh, I've got the gift, right, but I.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Didn't know, Like it's randomly generated, so it's not like
someone was on the other side thinking of that card.
So I literally I was like, what do I do?
I was like, I'm just guessing.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
So that brings up some interesting stuff, like there's there's
evidence that when a machine is involved, Yeah, there is
no telepathy. There would only be clairvoyance, right, yeah, So
I mean if telepathy is you picking up what's in
someone else's mind and a computer is mindless, then you
(24:42):
shouldn't be able what you were saying, like, you should
it shouldn't you should not be able to know what
zener card it's going to pick next, right, But there
have been investigations using computers and using machines that show
above chance, yeah, that there is some sort of weird interaction.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Like a random number generators.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Yes, yeah, So Princeton University has a department called the
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Department PAIR, right, of course, and
Pair has been doing studies for a couple of decades.
They've done millions of trials and basically they'll say, this
is a random number generator or this this machine operates
randomly or whatever. We want you to think of a number,
(25:24):
and we want to see if you can influence the
numbers that this computer spits out.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Oh so you're thinking of the number, then the you're okay.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
That makes like the human is trying to affect the computer,
the output the behavior of the computer. Of course, if
you're sitting across the room or in another room thinking
about a number that a random generator should put out,
it should have zero effect whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
It's a computer.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
The weird thing is is what Princeton has found is
that yes, over enough trials, you there is a slight
very slight but measurable effect that human has on a
random number generator. Come on, it's on Princeton's website. And
this is stuff that like is apparently accepted in the
in the scientific community that the trials that they are
(26:12):
running are so widespread and so repeatable and have been
done so many times that the data that they're coming
up with is it's significant.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Well, Ryan with his inner card experiments in the thirties
did find that some people got what they thought were
pretty impressive results, like you know a few I can't
remember their names, but Hubert Pierce was he one of them.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
He was the one how.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Many what was his percentage?
Speaker 1 (26:39):
He had one where he got remember how you got
three in a row and you were like, oh my god, Yeah,
he got twenty five in a row once? What twenty five?
Come on, No, I'm not kidding. He was also documented
as selecting five hundred and fifty eight correct out of
eighteen hundred and fifty which is the odds of that
happening by chain. Yeah, we're twenty two billion to one.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Now, were these the early experiments because okay, because I
did read that and this seems like I can't believe
he didn't check this, but apparently the early cards were
a little translucent. Oh really, yeah, some of them were.
And then he corrected for that and the and the
percentages went down. And then they, I know, other scientists
(27:23):
said that you are somehow influencing with your body tell right,
like you basically you don't have a good enough poker vase.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Yeah. In the earliest Ryan experiments with the xener cards,
he would hold the card up and go and he'd
be making eye contacts right the guy. Yeah, The guesser
would be like, is it the wavy line? Yeah, he
started shaking his head almost in perseent, but he uh he.
That's called sensory leakage, where you the person who is
(27:55):
holding the card and knows who the card is. Yeah,
somehow there's some detail about your face that when you
do a thousand trials with somebody, yeah, they start to
pick up on and it affects their guests. It influences
their guests. So to correct for that, to control for
that sensory leakage, that cross, Yeah, they they came up
(28:18):
with something called the gans Field experiment.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Ah. Yes, as a German gunsfeld that means whole field
in German, and that is when they started putting people,
they would start depriving their other senses. Basically, right, they
would be in a like a dimly lit room with
red lighting, and they would have white noise, and they
would have their eyes covered with these special glasses.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Or ping pong balls cut in half like Kermit the Frog.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
I guess later on they said, we should just make
some glasses.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Exactly, We've got the funding.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
So basically the idea was, let's rule out any uh
any of that gross sensory leakage.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Yeah, which he so apparently. Later on in Ryan's experiments,
after he started controlling for stuff, the percentages started to
drop of correct guesses. He was also he's generally a
respected researcher for a couple of reasons. One, whenever he
(29:22):
did whenever evidence of like some sort of bias or
fraud or something was brought to him, he corrected for it.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Yeah, he wore glasses and a white coat, right.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
That was another one. But also he was daring enough
to stake his entire career on a field of study
that will get anybody mocked publicly privately, can really shut
down a lot of opportunities for you. This guy and
his wife Louisa Ryan both dedicated their careers to establishing
(29:58):
the field of parapsychology and really studying it rather than
just walking away from it.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Yeah, I don't think he was like, I really want
to prove this is true?
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Was he?
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yes, he did that.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
That was a huge criticism of him. He got you
was a definite believer. He was quoted by I don't
know what the guy's steal was, but one day he
was visited by one person and the interviewer who went
on to write a paper I think in Scientific American
to expose him. He said he kept a file of
(30:32):
people of the results of tests where people he suspected
were purposefully getting things wrong because they didn't like him
to mess with his data. He just took those and
never published them. He didn't include him in the results,
which would definitely affect the number of correct hits.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
That was a huge criticism. That's not good science at all.
But he was definitely a believer, which was another criticism.
But he was daring and he did. There was another
story where it's called the Levy affair, where a guy
named Levy, who was an electrical engineer working in the
lab unplugged I guess the sensor that would correct negative
(31:16):
hits for a little while during a trial, so that
all that were recorded for a little bit were positive hits,
and then he plugged it back in. Well, this one
guy saw what the guy was doing and went to Ryan,
and Ryan went to the guy Levy and said, did
you do this? And Levy said yes, he's like you're fired,
and just like threw the results away and all that.
So he wasn't like he was a true believer, but
(31:37):
he wasn't just some like outright fraud right right, But
he was and still is under the microscope as much
as probably any researcher in all of academia ever has been.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
All right, Well, right after this break, we'll talk a
little bit about what skeptics say about ESB. All right, Josh.
(32:10):
One thing you'll hear skeptics say a lot is extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence. And I have to agree with them. Yeah,
And it is an extraordinary claim here, and so far
there hasn't been extraordinary evidence. And one of the things
I pointed to earlier that I think is what's going
on if you look at statistics, you look at six
(32:32):
billion people on planet Earth and them thinking a gazillion
things each day, and that is scientific, by the way, gazillion.
At some point somebody is going to think something that
mirrors something that happens in the near future, and it's
just chance and coincidence.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
I have a great example of that, man. Okay, it
happened this very morning. What yeah, I did. I was
at the printer. You know, we just moved offices, and
I was at the printer and I had like an
extra pizza paper that I didn't need, and I realized, like,
we have no paper recycling here.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
So on my way back yet that is everyone out
there is like, what kind of office would I.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Right, we just said we have a fifty five gallon
drum that we throw stuff into that it catches on fire.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, and then we send it out.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
We have a burning drum, that's what it's called.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Now we're getting those soon.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Right, And we are getting them soon. I know this
because on my way back to my desk, I popped
into Izzy, the it guy who's also the head of
all recycling and stuff here. I was like, Izzy, we
need a paper recycling bins by the printer, and he goes,
I'm writing an email right now to everybody about that
very thing.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
You almost did your Izzy impression.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, it was close, and so, like I thought about it,
that's pretty amazing. Yeah, you know, but it was about
nine in the morning, and this is a company wide email,
so it would be something that Izzy would probably knock
out about that time.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
The reason I was thinking of is because I was
just at the printer. We just moved into this office
and we didn't have bins yet, so it was still
a potential thing for somebody to be thinking about or
doing or writing an email about. And so there's all
these different, really overlooked variables or factors to this whole
thing that you don't think of. Instead, it just seems
(34:21):
like an amazing coincidence or ESP. To me, the really
significant thing was that I happened to be researching ESP
while this happened. That's what really kind of stood out
to me. But if you really kind of look at it,
like there's a finite amount of things that people could
think about in any given day, in any given context
in an office or something like that, Like had I
(34:44):
been a goat at a petting zoo and I went
over and talked to the cow and the cow was
writing the email about recycling bins. Maybe, but we're in
an office. I'm talking to the guy about recycling bins.
There's just a lot of stuff that you kind of
Once you take that into account, it becomes less amazing,
(35:04):
Like like the guy writing the Titan Titanic book.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, you know what used to happen to me now
that I think of it is I used to and
this it's weird. It was only with phone landlines. It
hadn't happened with the cell phone. But I used to
like know the phone was going to ring right before
it rang. Oh yeah, like almost go to reach for it.
And I mean it's not like it happened all the time,
but it happened enough times where I was like, oh,
(35:27):
that's weird.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Sure, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
But that was all it was to me. I was
not like I have the gift.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Well think about it in that respect too. You know
fifteen twenty people. So was it you knew who was
calling or just that the phone was about.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
To run now just that it was about to ring.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Oh yeah, that is weird. You definitely do have.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Esp yeah, or maybe I don't know, maybe the phone
made a little tick noise right before it rang that
I didn't pick up on. Yeah, but only subconsciously, you know.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Well, that's another explanation for it. That, right, that there
is subliminal stuff in the environment that is just too
weak in nature for us to pick up on consciously,
but our unconscious does or subconscious does, which frankly opens
up a whole other can of worms. You know, as
(36:18):
far as you know, how real is that kind of
thing there, But probably a little closer to reality is
the idea that our attention isn't focused on everything that
we're picking up at all times, like like I see
your beard, and I see your shirt and everything, but
I'm still also picking up like sensory information from like
Jerry's computer that I can see in my peripheral vision
(36:40):
or whatever. My attention isn't focused on it, but my
brain is still receiving information. So the idea that our
brains can put it together all this information that we're
not aware consciously that we're receiving, but we're still getting
impressions from it. That's that could be a great explanation
for esp as well.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, and you know what now to think about it,
The fact that it's never happened with my cell phone.
Sort of makes sense because maybe there it was a
mechanical function a landline.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Right, Yeah, like you said a click or a tick,
But yeah, I think you meant like a click.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
And it wasn't even the newer model. This was back
in the day when it was yeah, a ringing like bell. Sure,
so maybe that does explain it.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah. I've got another good example that I came across
from researching this. Let's say that you and I are
hanging out, yeah, and you're humming a Baby on the
fire work, right, just over and over again. I don't
know that song, but I'm reading Yes you do, No,
I don't, Yeah you do it? Was it Katy Perry?
I don't know Katy Perry anyway.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Although I will have to say I did love that
halftime show. It was great, well it was. It was hysterical.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
What's up with the sharks being a meme? Now?
Speaker 2 (37:51):
It was thin?
Speaker 1 (37:52):
They were really significant.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
She looked like she worked at corn Dog on a Stick.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
I don't know what that is that' thought all corn
dogs are on sticks.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
It's that place in the Hot Dog on a stick,
that place in the mall where they were those big
giant Yeah. No, I don't know anything about Katy Perry,
but it was the funniest most Like the crazy just
kept coming and coming, and I was like, this is
the best thing I've ever seen. So anyway, in.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
This universe, you're well aware of Katy Perry and her
song Firework, and you're humming it to yourself. But I'm
sitting there reading the New Yorker and I'm engrossed in it,
and I don't notice that you get up to go
make some nachos, and you come back in, and you
catch my attention because you're coming back in with some
nachos and they smell awesome, And now my attention is
(38:37):
directed to you, and you're still humming Firework right right,
And I'm like, I was just thinking about that song Firework.
I had that in my head. How crazy we must
be connected. I didn't realize that you had been humming
it earlier, and beneath my awareness I picked it up.
Although once I became aware that you were humming it,
it seemed to me like I had well.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Yeah, And that ties into another explanation is that people
who do seem to have that gift are just really,
really hyper observant on minute details. Like the same people
that can pick up on micro expressions. They might feel
like they have the gift because they're just really in
tune to what's going on around them or not just
like a big lunkhead walking around.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
So a lot of people who believe in ESP say, yes,
we agree with that, especially parapsychology researchers, and there are
still plenty of respected ones out there. There's a guy
named Darryl Bem.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Yeah, I saw that thing you sent. He's been doing
this for a while now.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Yeah, legitimately we should talk about him. But to button
up that point, there is a lot of parapsychologists or
even just plain old psychologists who are researching ESP, yeah,
who say, yes, that definitely most likely accounts for almost
all of it, and that's good for us to be
(39:59):
thinking about that, and that in and of it self
deserves like academic inquiry and research. Right. Yeah, But there
are still some experience experiments that are being produced by
guys like Daryl Bem that are showing some weird results
that go beyond this kind of explanation.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Yeah. And one of the problems, well, we'll talk about
the problems with even this research about it being reproducible
in a second. But he did a couple of experiments.
This is from NPR.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Akroll which wrote this. Oh really, yeah, from from from
Radio Lab.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Nice. I didn't know that these are the two that
he pointed out. He did nine different experiments, but the
two that he highlighted was at Cornell, which is where
bim is A does his work, right.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
Yeah, and he's again a very respected psychologist. And this study,
that of these experiments was published in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, which is a respected journal.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Yeah. So they The first one was a computer quiz.
They took a hundred student it's fifty males and fifty women,
and basically they showed a computer screen with two little
curtains on it, side by side and said behind one
is nothing a brick wall, and behind the other is
something sexy. Yeah, some kind of you know, I was
(41:19):
about to call it pornographic, but who knows. Maybe it's
art nakednessism.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
Yeah, gross, This just make you feel like your dad
saying it or something.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yeah, well, this room's too small for you to say.
So basically he would say, you tell me what you
think you're going to see, and they were all hooked
up two machines to read the you know, they're what's
going on in their body, of course, and you would
think it would be a fifty to fifty result, but
they actually got a fifty three point one percent result
(41:54):
for the what uh Crawlwitch calls erotic stimuli. And basically
they they think, or at least that's what Bem thinks,
is that one possibility is that if there is if
they think they're going to see something erotically stimulating, then
(42:15):
it got passed back through time.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Yeah, that's kind of his position, is that retrocognition thing. Yeah,
that they somehow their future selves who saw the erotic
image was stimulated enough that that stimulation traveled backwards three
seconds and influenced their choice.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Because they were they would be slightly stimulated physiologically right
before they guess. And he said, before the computer even
chose which which one to.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Show, right, they right, they were making their choices often correct,
before the computer chose to show an erotic or non
erotic image. And fifty three percent it doesn't sound like much,
but Krolwitch points out a couple of things. One that
when there was a control group that was shown non
eurotic pictures. Yeah, they did forty nine point eight percent correct,
(43:04):
which is chance.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
And they're fifty to fifty and they're all not happy, right,
They're like, I don't want to be the control.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
They're like, can we get a little steamier in here?
But and he also pointed out that fifty three fifty
three point one, to be specific, doesn't sound like much,
but apparently that's a point two percent chance where on
a scale between zero and one, where zero is it's
(43:32):
not going to happen, and one is that it's definitely
gonna happen. Yeah, And apparently, as far as correlation goes,
or links between two things something affecting another, a point
two is about the same as the link between aspirin
and heart attack prevention, the link between calcium intake and
(43:52):
bone mass, the link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
So things that are touted is like, pay attention to.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
This, yesh, yeah, yeah exactly. So stuff that we accept
is like, yeah, yeah, if you're around second and smoke,
you can get cancer from that. This is probably has
the same exactly, yeah it is. And later on a
meta analysis of Bem's experiments, some other experiments that were
carried out afterward, and then some other experiments all grouped
(44:20):
together a meta analysis showed that they weren't. It wasn't
statistically significant if you took all of the existing body
of literature of these experiments. But it was a New
Scientist article and it was pretty cool. In the comment section,
somebody said, yeah, it's not reproducible, but a lot of
(44:44):
science isn't reproducible, And it reminded me of our scientific
method episode, Yeah, where like apparently a lot of trials
that like pharmaceuticals are based on aren't reproducible. Wasn't it
like fifty percent of them?
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Yeah, which doesn't surprise me of course.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
All right, And then there was this other experiment that
I need you to explain to me because I didn't
understand it. Okay, you're ready, Like I got the first part,
but I didn't. It didn't make sense to.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Me because it's a little mind blowing.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
So you know how like if you are studying something, sure,
and you write it down, Yes, it gets in your
brain a little more.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Yeah, so that when you're tested on it later, you
will recall it more easily.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Yeah, that's a common study method. Write something down okay.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
So Bem carried out a very simple experiment that did
the opposite of that. First, he showed some people a
bunch of a bunch of words, forty eight random words
I think noun's like tree or something like that.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah, and he told them to visualize it though, right.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Right, So they saw all forty eight words and thought about.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
Them, not visualized the letters, but visualized the thing, right,
like see the tree and.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
You're yeah, just just to kind of try to memorize
all forty eight words.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Then the computer randomly selected twenty four of those words,
and then after they'd done that, Bem gave them a
test of recall to see how many they recalled, right, Yes,
So the people had to type out the words they recalled.
Then after that, the computer randomly selected twenty four of
(46:15):
the forty eight words for the people to type after
they'd already taken the test of recall. And those twenty
four words are the ones that people more consistently got
right on the earlier tests.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Oh okay, So.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
It's another example of that retrocognition that these people getting
the words in their heads after the test somehow went
backward and influenced their recall and memory. Gocha for the
test that they took before they learned them.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
That makes more sense a little. Yeah, it is a little,
but see time travel melts my brain too. Right.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
So this guy published this stuff in like twenty ten,
and like it was, it made a huge, huge splash,
huge criticism. The Act Demic Journal was criticized and bem
was you know, pillar eat and all that. But he's
still you know, put out these these very reproducible, understandable,
simple exercises that still showed statistically speaking, there were some
(47:15):
significant results that went beyond chance.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
So when it comes to debunking ESP one thing that
you're not gonna you know, you said fraud, You're not
going to see a lot of people call researchers outright
frauds because that's just sort of a dangerous thing to say. Sure,
it's not nice, but there are people out there who
I guess are criticized for, you know, basically trying to
(47:39):
call out and this is something completely different. But these
these on stage psychic.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
Shows like crossing Over with John Edwards.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
Yeah, like it's easy to pick those people out and
say you're a big fraud and this is not true
of course, and all you're doing is cold reading. Cold
reading we talked about in the Animal Pet Psychics episode, Right,
that's basically when you get up on stage and you say, sir,
I'm sensing someone there. You're having some trouble with another
(48:08):
man in your life with a name of j or
or is it h or O P or maybe it's P.
Yes P, my boss Peter. Yes, yes, exactly. And that's
all a could reading is. It's throwing out these really
broad things that anyone can latch onto. So it's really
easy to call those people out. And there's a guy,
(48:30):
sort of a guy famous for doing that. His name
is James Randy, and he's famous for his offer of
one million dollars to anyone that can prove their psychic ability,
which of course no one stepped up to do that.
But then he gets poop pooed a little bit, like
you're just making a mockery of trying to legitimately disprove something.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
And mockery is absolutely the right word. Yeah, And to me,
the presence of mockery indicates the absence of objectivity.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
So like what you're dealing with then, with a guy
like that, is a set of beliefs a belief system
running up against another belief system, just like a couple
of religions or something like that. It's not objectivity against
fraud or anything like that. It's belief against belief or something.
And yeah, the idea of lumping together John Edwards with
(49:24):
Darryl bem is just that's, you know, fraudulent in and
of itself.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
Yeah, that's just they call that theatrics, just like the
on stage theatrics of a stage psychic. Yeah, so I
totally agree.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Yeah, you know, I do too. I think there's a
definite room for a healthy scientific inquiry into just about anything,
whether skeptics believe in it or not.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
Sure, if you can get some funding for it, who cares.
That's my motto.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
You got anything else on ESP, let me think. No,
I've got one more thing I found. I came across
the nineteen ninety i think five Nightline with Ted Copple, Yeah,
where the news broke that the CIA had been studying
ESP and trying to do remote viewing what Ronson was
(50:14):
talking about and the men who stare at goats?
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Oh yeah, John.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
When it finally became declassified in nineteen ninety five, Ted
Copple did like a twenty minute Nightline segment on it.
Totally worth watching. It's some pretty softball questions.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:28):
Robert Gates, who would later become the head of Defense. Yeah,
he's on there just basically trying as politely as possible
to show that he does not believe in any of this,
even though he was the Formacia director. And it's just neat.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
Plus you get to watch Copple again, right, he was
great news man. Yeah, I miss those dudes. I miss
I was just thinking yesterday about Brokaw.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Yeah, rather I was.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
I was always a Brokaw man.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Did you I liked Peter Jennings he was great.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
I don't even know all of them were great.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
I don't even have any idea who does nightly news
now I don't watch it.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
It was Brian Williams until about a day ago.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
Did he get fired? He like got I know, the
whole kerfuffle, but he didn't get fired for it.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
Did. I'm using my esp to predict that by the
time this came this comes out, who will not be
there anymore? Wow, I think this is getting big quick interesting.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
Yeah. Twitter's involved, man, the Twitter takedown.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Yeah. Uh. If you want to know more about ESP.
The internet was virtually set up for you to go
find out more about it. You can start by typing
ESP in the search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com. Since
I said that it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
Yeah, before we do listener mail, I just want to
give a quick shout out to my buddy Isaac McNairy.
If you remember, I did a Judge John Hodgman episode
with Emily in which I did a bad home renovation
and this dude stuff you should know. Listener from Kansas
carpenter Master Carpenter said hey, man, I'll come and stay
with you and help you do your your project there
(52:03):
right And I said this sounds crazy, and he actually
came and did it and it looks awesome and he's
a super cool guy. And if you're in Kansas near Eldoredo, Kansas,
there's no better guy to hire, El Dorados. It's El Daredo. Actually, Okay,
he has to point out, but not only is he
a great carpenter and a cool guy, but he works
(52:24):
with a nonprofit called Outreach Program And you can find
it an Outreach Program dot org where they're basically feeding
the world. They package food and they get people together
in a room and package these mass quantities of food
to send to other countries and feed the hungry. And
he's just a really good dude. So thanks to Isaac
(52:46):
for that. And my kitchen list is looking good. So
again for his nonprofit that is Outreach Program dot org.
And if you need a great carpenter and you're in Kansas,
check out retro Fit Remodeling.
Speaker 1 (52:57):
Nice.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
All right, listener mail to call this pronunciation help. Hey guys,
I'm a botanist and just wanted to throw throw you
a rope to help you out with pronouncing plant family names.
All plant family names end in A C.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
E A E. Oh yeah, I thought I got that wrong.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
It is a mess of vowels. Guys. When you read it,
you should just imagine you were spelling ace as in acee.
So when you read a plant family name, just break
off A the acee and read the first part and
then spell acee. So the plant family for poison oak
is Anacardia anacardi a ce. So it's just Anna cardi
(53:41):
a ce. I remember it by imagining the aneurysm and
cardiac arrest I would have if I fell into it
A N A C A R D I what well
she spelled out anna CARDI, Oh gotcha the first two
first letters from each of those words. Anyway, guys, I
(54:01):
love your podcast. Find it endearing when you two puzzle
out on pronunciations.
Speaker 1 (54:05):
Ace A, see, that's good to know.
Speaker 2 (54:08):
Yeah, so I love you, bunches and that is from Jane,
and she said ps. In Europe they pronounce plant families
completely differently other parts of see. Other parts of the
US might have other conventions, but the above pronunciation is
standard in California.
Speaker 1 (54:24):
Oh well, okay, what ac ac If you want to
let us know something that we should have known before
we even recorded, but you're generous enough with your time
and effort to correct us, I guess there's a way
to put it. Sure we That was very helpful. Thanks
(54:45):
a lot, Jane. If you want to be like Jane
in other words, you can send us an email to
Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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