by Will Storr
‘Wiseman’s a stage magician. A conjuror. A skilled deceiver,’ he replies. ‘He’s a huge asset to the materialist movement. He’s their hitman.’
The first paragraph of Wiseman’s bestseller Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There recounts what happened when he studied the psychic dog. ‘As I gazed deep into the eyes of Jaytee, several thoughts passed through my mind. Was this cute little terrier really psychic? If not, how had he managed to make headlines across the world? At that precise moment, Jaytee gave a small cough, leaned forward and vomited on my shoes.’
‘To understand materialists like Wiseman,’ says Sheldrake, ‘one has to realise that they totally believe these things are impossible. If someone comes up with positive evidence, either the experiment is flawed or I’ve cheated. Those are the only options on the menu: foolish or fraudulent. I’ve been through this argument with Skeptics again and again. They go through their various objections and I show them how I’ve accounted for them all. And then they say, “Oh, well, there must be some other flaw.” I say, “Well, what is it?” and they say, “We haven’t thought of it yet, but there must be one.” The point is, you can’t win. No evidence will ever be good enough. That’s just one of the problems of doing research in this area. One has to deal with this level of arrogance and ignorance that purports to be objective, scientific and reasonable, but which is deeply unscientific and unreasonable.’
In 2006 Rupert Sheldrake was given a ‘Pigasus’ award by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), for ‘the scientist who said or did the silliest thing’ during the previous year. ‘This man’s delusions increase as time goes by,’ they said, on announcing the prize, ‘and he comes up with sillier ideas every year.’ Like all practitioners of what he calls ‘woo woo’, Randi points to Sheldrake’s failure to apply for his ‘Million Dollar Challenge’ as evidence that he secretly knows that he is wrong. On his website, Randi writes, somewhat cryptically: ‘Sheldrake is still clinging to some strange story he relates about a previous encounter with me, a tale that fails to make its point. He’ll depend upon this to avoid becoming involved with any testing process related to the Million Dollar Challenge, of course. I find it not at all strange that these folks fear involvement with the JREF more than they fear Hell itself!’
‘Randi is a liar,’ says Sheldrake. ‘He’s a man of very doubtful character indeed – a rude, aggressive, dogmatic Skeptic who knows nothing about science. He’s taken seriously by people like Dawkins – they worship him – because they see themselves as engaged in a war against unreason and religion. And if you’re in a war, you want to have thugs on your side.’
People such as Dawkins, Randi and Wiseman are suffering, says Sheldrake, from an acute sensitivity to doubt. ‘Fundamentalists, whether religious, materialist or atheist, are people who need certainty,’ he says. ‘They’re not prepared to live in a place with doubts. It’s very similar to creationism. Some creationists will look at scientific evidence but only so that they can try and find some flaw. That’s also true of the denialists about psychic phenomena.’
When I tell Sheldrake that I am going to be interviewing Richard Wiseman, I sense a moment of tension and then resignation. ‘You’ll probably find him very convincing,’ he sighs.
*
It began, for Richard Wiseman, when he was eight. He was at his grandad’s house in Luton when the old man asked him to write his name on a coin. With the wave of a handkerchief, the coin disappeared. Then his grandad produced a tobacco tin, whose lid was held fast with elastic bands. Inside that was another tin with more bands. Inside that, a cloth bag. And inside that, Richard’s coin.
But the moment that truly ignited Richard’s curiosity came weeks later, when his grandad revealed how the trick worked. Richard was aghast. How easy it was to fool the mind! How simple, to conjure the appearance of magic when, in fact, there was only illusion! For the boy, it was a fantastic revelation; a vision of the fallibility of humans.
Richard began studying tricks, digging through second-hand bookshops for guides to magic and debunking accounts of the silly mysteries believed by his classmates: spontaneous combustion, stigmata, the Bermuda Triangle. At the age of twelve, he had his own touring show. At university, he earned a PhD in the psychology of deception. When he heard about the work of ‘parapsychologists’ – actual scientists who studied subjects like telepathy – he became fascinated. In a universe that is constructed from simple matter, these things are impossible. So why do people persist in believing in them? How have they been fooled?
I meet Wiseman outside Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road in central London, where he is appearing later as part of his Paranormality publicity tour. After he has baffled my demonstrably faulty brain with a coin trick in a nearby greasy spoon, I tell him that I want to write about his fights with Sheldrake, because they seem to represent a fascinating battle of ideas. He greets this suggestion with a contemptuous laugh.
‘I’ve got a few problems with Rupert. If you look at the mainstream body of parapsychology, he’s not very well represented. He’s rarely even discussed. The reason is that there are often errors in his work.’
Wiseman tells me that a German academic named Stefan Schmidt conducted a meta-analysis of Sheldrake-inspired staring studies. And Sheldrake’s work wasn’t included. ‘It’s not even mentioned,’ he says. ‘And the reason for that is that it’s just not good enough quality.’
The criticisms go on. To ensure that the person being stared at isn’t somehow unconsciously ‘learning’ the right answer, you need a random mechanism to tell the starer when to look and when to look away. In some of his tests, Rupert used a coin toss. ‘And that hasn’t been an acceptable way of doing it since the 1930s. You only need a small bias in the coin to completely throw your data. Why wouldn’t you just use any of the more sophisticated random number systems?’
He goes on to say that, even with the staree blindfolded and sitting behind a one-way mirror, there is no guarantee he couldn’t somehow ‘hear’ when he was being stared at. When I respond with a doubtful face, Wiseman smiles. ‘You’ve got better hearing than you realise. We know people hear below the conscious threshold.’
He then provides a study by academics at the University of Amsterdam who largely failed to replicate Sheldrake’s tests. They think he might have got his 55 per cent score because people have a natural bias both towards saying ‘yes’ and changing their answer between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ – and, with bad randomisation, these alterations could affect the outcome.
Wiseman tried to replicate Sheldrake’s staring tests with parapsychologist Marilyn Schlitz. On the first test, when Wiseman was the starer, they didn’t get a positive result. But when Marilyn stared, they did. It happened on the second test, too. ‘I never published that study because I’m not happy with it,’ says Wiseman. ‘We messed it up. But I can see proponents arguing that it was positive.’
‘But you wouldn’t agree with that?’ I ask.
‘No, but I wouldn’t disagree with it either. That one, you just go, “Eeerrrr.”’
Wiseman went on to conduct four tests on Jaytee the dog, at Sheldrake’s invitation. His conclusions led to scathing newspaper headlines, such as ‘Psychic dog is no more than a chancer’ (The Times) and ‘Psychic pets are exposed as a myth’ (Daily Telegraph). All of this enraged Sheldrake. His first complaint was obvious – that he had carried out more than a hundred tests on Jaytee, while Wiseman had done just four, and yet the psychologist’s claims were taken as superior. He also objected that Wiseman didn’t even test his claim, that Jaytee was at the window more when Pam was on the way home. Rather, he tested to see if Jaytee’s first visit of more than two minutes corresponded with the beginning of Pam’s return. That was a different claim. And it didn’t correspond. Well, it might have done on the final test, if Jaytee hadn’t been sick.
Then there was a dramatic twist. Sheldrake requested Wiseman’s data. When he analysed it, he found that they actually confirmed his claim. Acc
ording to Wiseman’s own figures, Jaytee was at the window 4 per cent of the time when Pam wasn’t coming home and 78 per cent when she was. While Wiseman admits this is true, he attacks both this and the best of Sheldrake’s evidence on the basis that Jaytee might have just been going to the window more frequently as time went on because he was missing his owner.
He explains that he tested his different claim because he had seen it on The Paul McKenna Show, because it was what Pam had told him and because his work took place at the beginning, before Sheldrake’s claim existed.
‘Our work was very, very early on,’ he tells me.
‘But I thought you came in after Sheldrake’s work?’ I say, slightly confused.
‘No, at the same time as Rupert is doing his work,’ he says.
‘I thought he invited you in?’
‘No. Rupert was doing it concurrently. So I don’t know at what point he came up with this notion of plotting how long the dog is at the window for. It was not around when we were doing our work. It emerged after we had done it. And certainly our paper was published way before his.’
All of this is rather confusing. But it is important, because Sheldrake tells the story as if Wiseman was engaged in a kind of cynical, sceptical drive-by shooting. He says that he invited Wiseman to test Jaytee, only for Wiseman to come along and test a different claim, which was then used to slate him and his work – even though the data actually confirmed it. So I called Sheldrake and told him what Wiseman had said.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘That is such a distortion.’
Sheldrake insists that his claim was there from the start, but Wiseman never asked him about it, instead seeking information from Pam (who, incidentally, wouldn’t know how her dog was behaving because – obviously – she was out when he was doing it). He says that he began his work a year before The Paul McKenna Show reported on it. ‘I arranged Wiseman’s test and invited him to do it,’ Sheldrake says. ‘I even lent him my video camera.’
‘He also said that his paper was published before yours,’ I told him.
‘Well, that’s a simple fact,’ says Sheldrake. ‘And it’s an outrage that it was. When he told me he was going to publish it, I said, “Well, look, Richard, it means you’re cutting in ahead of me. I’m not publishing my data because I haven’t finished the studies yet. I’m doing a whole series of controls, I’m doing repeated tests.” But he cut in. I’d done more than a hundred observations on this dog. He’d done four. Then I said to him, “Why haven’t you referred to all the experiments I did in your paper?” He said, “I couldn’t refer to them because they’re unpublished.” But I’d already shown him all the data. I mean, this is rather shocking. Very shocking. But the point is, in his own eyes, he’s probably completely guiltless. It’s a level of self-deception that I’m astonished by.’
Later I come across a paper that Wiseman had sent me following our meeting co-written by him in reply to some of Sheldrake’s criticisms. It confirms that Sheldrake ‘kindly invited [Wiseman] to conduct his own investigations of Jaytee,’ and that they took a month after Sheldrake started his video tests and more than a year after his studies of Jaytee’s purported psychic abilities actually began.
I decide to look up the Schmidt meta-analysis that Wiseman talked about, which he said excluded Sheldrake’s work because ‘it’s just not good enough quality.’ I am surprised to find it concludes that there is a ‘small but significant effect’ of the sense of being stared at. But I am more surprised yet when Sheldrake tells me that he was excluded from it, not because his work was deemed sloppy, but because it is an analysis of experiments that separated starer from staree using CCTV – something that Sheldrake has never done. He addresses more of Wiseman’s concerns, explaining that he has used three different kinds of randomisation – including one ‘which I got a professor of statistics in Holland to supply and to check, so those are completely pukka’ – and another that was proposed by Wiseman himself – and still his results were positive.
Meanwhile, the authors of the University of Amsterdam study that Wiseman sent me admit their criticisms only count when the staree was given feedback on how well he was doing. They concede that Sheldrake also carried out trials without feedback (as he did on me) and found smaller, but still significant effects. Sheldrake says that his different randomisation methods dispense with their other complaints. But then Wiseman sends more concerns. And Sheldrake counters them, adding a meta-analysis that confirms his view.
It goes on like this for some time.
So what is the ordinary human to do? What am I to do? When do I stop going back and forth between them? Is it even possible to find a truth to these matters? The answer, perhaps, is to step back. I ask Wiseman if he is one hundred per cent convinced that the claims of parapsychology – often shortened to ‘psi’ – are wrong.
‘No,’ he says. ‘But I’m convinced enough.’
‘Give it a percentage.’
‘Ninety per cent.’
Wiseman’s career as a celebrity Skeptic is predicated on there being no such thing as paranormal phenomena. He admits to never having had any ‘interest in investigating if it’s true because I’ve always thought it isn’t.’ So is it surprising that he is only ‘90 per cent’ certain about this? Actually, it isn’t. Many academics are prepared to admit that parapsychologists have proven psi phenomena by the standards usually demanded by science. Computer pioneer Alan Turing once said, ‘How we should like to discredit [psi]! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.’ The New Scientist has reported that, ‘For years, well-designed studies carried out by researchers at respected institutions have produced evidence for the reality of ESP. The results are often more impressive than the outcome of clinical drug trials because they show a more pronounced effect and have greater statistical significance. What’s more, ESP experiments have been replicated and their results are as consistent as many medical trials – and even more so in some cases.’ As far back as 1951, pioneering neuroscientist Donald Hebb admitted that we have been ‘offered enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue,’ and admitted that his rejection of it ‘is – in the literal sense – prejudice.’ And far more recently, in 2008, a famously sceptical psychologist said, ‘I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that [psi] is proven.’ That was Professor Richard Wiseman.
They reject psi for the same reason that many scientists and Skeptics feel that they can dismiss Sheldrake’s work without first having studied it. Because, what is more likely? That parapsychologists are mistaken or fraudulent? Or that a psychic terrier from Ramsbottom has proved that a foundational principle of science is wrong? A common materialist slogan, often attributed to Carl Sagan, says, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ As Wiseman tells me, ‘A lot of physics and psychology will be called into question the moment you accept psi. Therefore, it’s reasonable to say that the weight of evidence for it must be much greater.’
I tell Wiseman that Sheldrake thinks science doesn’t have to be overturned to accept his proposed new ‘information field’. Rather, it would just need to expand, as it did when we discovered electricity, quantum theory and the electro-magnetic field.
‘But you could go the other way,’ Wiseman replies, ‘which is just assume there’s no problem. That the mind is simply a by-product of the brain.’
But that is the thing. There is a problem. How is the conscious function of the ‘mind’ created? We look in the brain and see the hemispheres, the regions, the neurons, the glia, the synapses and all the highly complex feedback loops. We know that certain neural activity correlates with certain experiences – which areas of the brain are involved with seeing yellow, for example, or eating hummus. We have a good idea how we make decisions. We know that visual information is processed in around thirty different areas of the brain. But we don’t even begin to see how all of that might come together – to coalesce into that incredible sensation
of singularity – that feeling of ‘I’, of agency, that sits on top of the stew of emotions and urges and sensations and memories that we feel at any one moment. How do all these cells create private, subjective experience? Where do all these disparate brain regions unite in order to generate the illusion that you are the ‘invisible actor at the centre of the world’, the one who is seeing, hearing, smelling, remembering, talking and feeling sad or hopeful or brave?
And why? If our sole living purpose is the propagation of our selfish genes, then why shouldn’t we just be zombies – unconscious decision-engines roaming the earth, maximising our chances of survival by making simple decisions, beating each other up and procreating as much as possible? Nobody knows. In fact, this is such a hard problem that it is actually known among philosophers and neuroscientists as ‘the hard problem’.
A small number of academics believe that searching the brain for consciousness is akin to watching a television show and then hunting in its circuit boards for the presenters. For them, consciousness exists on an external field and our brains interact with it, a little like how the eye and our various visual processing areas interact with electrical impulses that are out there to create vision. That is why ‘the hard problem’ is proving to be so hard: because we have been looking in the wrong place.
If there is even a remote chance that this is true, then there is also a chance that Sheldrake and his fellow parapsychologists might be right. Because if such a crucial component of mind can be out there, then it theoretically might be able to interact with other minds that are also out there.
What is required is a referee. Someone who knows brains, is widely recognised as brilliant and yet has a foot in neither the Sheldrake nor the Wiseman camp. I decide to contact American neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman. Well known for his research into how the brain processes time, he has been profiled in the New Yorker and described as a ‘genius’ by the Observer; he calls himself a ‘Possibilian’, rejecting certainty in science as an ‘absurd’ position. But this is no anti-materialist. On the contrary, Eagleman is a disciple of Sheldrake’s arch-materialist foe Francis Crick, and says that he spent all of his ‘intellectual time’ with him during his postdoctoral studies.
