Anomal Lover:Twenty Years of Paranormal Studies at Goldsmiths.

"It's so good to be back here again. Having fun with all my friends. When everybody says hello you know there's nowhere else to go" - So Good To Be Back Home Again, The Tourists.

799 days! That's over two years, more than twenty-six months, since I've attended a London Skeptics in the Pub event in an actual pub. With other living breathing people. I'd planned to go to an LFS talk about leylines in London a couple of weeks back but I had a pretty severe attack of gout and I needed to rest up.

The gout hasn't gone completely (I've a doctor's appointment, a telephone one, this Friday) but it's in my hand rather than my foot so I walked down to The Miller in Borough (the old Skeptics venue, The Monarch in Camden, closed down at the start of 2020 and has now reopened as a sports themed bar called 'Monarchy' - which is fine for sports fans but hardly appropriate for evening lectures and debates on flat Earthers, critical thinking, or vagina museums) and met there with fellow Skeptics Dewi, Tim, and Sid for a pint and a seat in the upstairs room to hear the head honcho of Greenwich Skeptics, Professor Chris French, deliver an amiable lecture by the name of The Science of Weird Sh*t:Twenty Years of Weird Science at Goldsmiths.

The asterisks aren't mine. They're the 'model's own'. I don't use asterisks in swear words. It's pointless and it's insulting. If you're concerned swear words may offend people then just don't use them. If you use them and then asterisk them out you're making them doing the swearing. You twat. Which is something Professor Chris French most definitely is not. 

In fact, he's a knowledgeable, funny, and very amiable speaker (which I already knew as I've seen him speaking before many times, about subjects like Satanism and reincarnation). He's recently retired (well, October 2020 counts as recent in the chaotic timeline we're living in) from his position as Professor of Psychology and head of their Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit (APRU) at Goldsmiths and the evening was as much a celebration of his career as it was a typical Skeptics event.

The Prof had family and friends present and it all made for a rather convivial and jovial atmosphere. One, no doubt, enhanced by people's joy at being back in the pub for one of these talks. Chris French began with something of a personal history. He told us how, as a teenager and a young man, he used to believe in quite a lot of paranormal stuff but he has long since transitioned into a Skeptic.

He'd been a big fan of the spoon bender Uri Geller but by the time he'd met Geller, on a Jeremy Vine hosted radio show, he'd seen through his fraudulent act and was most amused when Geller told him he didn't like the Skeptic and Humanist psychology professor Richard Wiseman because he thought he was a 'publicity seeker'.

Imagine being called a publicity seeker by Uri Geller. After seven years of university in Manchester, Bangor, and Leicester, French read James Alcock's Parapsychology:Science or Magic? and this put him on a road which led to him subscribing to the Skeptical Enquirer, discovering the stage magician and Skeptic James Randi, and, in 2000, founding the APRU at Goldsmiths.

Anomalistic Psychology is the study of what appears to be paranormal or extraordinary phenomena but in terms of known psychological and physical factors. Many higher up in Goldsmiths didn't see the point of studying this kind of thing on the basis that, and I paraphrase, it's quite clearly all a load of old bollocks but French observed that every society, everywhere in the world, throughout the entirety of time, has had some form of belief in the paranormal so it would be weird not to study it.

With such widespread belief there could only be two explanations. Either there was some truth in this stuff or, more likely, there were deeply held reasons that people chose to believe in paranormal phenomena. It certainly seemed worth investigating to find out why that might be.

People have believed, variously, in ghosts, UFOs, the devil, God (or gods), horoscopes, reincarnation, angels, and precognitive dreams so there's a wide range of topics to tackle. Chris French wondered if anyone in the audience believed in psychokinesis and asked of us "if you believe in psychokinesis can you please raise my hand".

He likes a joke, Chris, and he even repeated his one about coughing up the prohibitively expensive cost of joining a reincarnation society ("well, you only live once") but he wanted to make it clear he wasn't what he likes to call a "type 1 Skeptic". Type 1 Skeptics think all psychics are deliberate frauds. Or that they're seriously deluded and that those that believe in them are either liars or stupid.

Chris French, while admitting those descriptions do fit some, takes a more nuanced approach. The studies him and his team in the APRU have carried out have found that people who are easily, and fully, absorbed into films, video games, and even tasks are more prone to believing in fantasty, to hypnotic susceptibility, and false memories.

Which explains why I'm not. I can barely concentrate on a single task for a few minutes. I'm amazed I ever finish any of these blogs. False memories became a particular interest for the APRU. Most people clearly remember where they were and who they were with when major news events happen (for my generation, 9/11, for older generations, man walking of the moon or the assassination of JFK) but, studies have shown, that even these seemingly solid memories are less reliable than we like to think.

 

Following the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster of 1986, in which all seven crew members died, a group of students were handed a questionnaire and asked where they were when they heard the news and who they were with. Two years later the same students were handed the same questionnaire and though some gave the same answers, some gave wildly different ones and even went so far as to say that the first answers were clearly untrue.

When al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah bombed a tourist district of Bali in 2002 and killed 202 people, plenty of people asked about it said they remembered watching the footage of the bombing on television. Despite the fact that there never was any footage of the terrible event. Those who claimed to remember seeing this non-existent footage, perhaps unsurprisingly, scored very highly when it came to paranormal belief.

Which took us to the theory of 'memory conformity'. If you're with a group of people and you witness a major event, something unusual or something horrific, you will most likely discuss that event with the people you were with. Some group members have more power of suggestion than others and their memories can 'persuade' others to change their recollections.

This takes us back to Geller and his spoon bending (a bent spoon, as I've long said, is a useless spoon). When plants in the audience observed that not only was Geller bending the spoon by gently rubbing it but that the spoon continued to bend even once he'd laid it on the table and taken his hands off it. If  these plants said they could still see the spoon bending, others soon piped up to agree that they could too.

When there were no plants in the audience nobody at all claimed they could still see the spoon bending on its own. When Sally Morgan, or Psyhic Sally - who styles herself as Britain's best loved psychic, was performing to a rapt audience in Dublin one of her fans, who'd up to this point been blown away by her talents, overheard a male voice from above the stage giving instructions to Sally.

 

Another audience member confirmed this had been happening so Chris French and the science author Simon Singh asked Psychic Sally if she'd agree to her psychic powers being tested by them. She refused (of course) but two other psychics took up the challenge. They were marked on five different categories for their psychic abilities (and they'd both agreed fully to the rules of the challenge). One of them scored one out of five and the other scored zero.

Chris French isn't saying there is no paranormal phenomena out there in the world but he is saying that, as yet, he's never met a single person who truly has psychic powers so now, even in his retirement, he's keeping his Skeptic hat on and, luckily for us, still coming out to host talks like this.

It was a great evening and one that took in the oft shown invisible gorilla video, people who claim they're 'magnetic', and something called the retroactive facilitation of recall and it was an evening in which I was both entertained and educated (one of the things I learned was that you can't clap very well with gout in your hand).

Thanks to Dewi, Tim, and Sid for keeping me company and thanks to Professor Chris French and London Skeptics in the Pub for making the return to the pub for these talks so enjoyable. Ariane Sherine's up next time and she's bloody brilliant.