Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there

by Richard Wiseman

  In the Land of the Blind

  Before progressing to the fifth and final principle of psychic deception, it is first important to turn back the hands of time and find out about one of the most controversial experiments in the history of supernatural science.

  In 1890 Mr S. J. Davey announced that he had acquired the gift of mediumship and invited small groups of people to his London home to witness his remarkable abilities. Each group gathered in Davey’s dining room and was asked to sit around a table. He then lowered the gaslight and joined the group.

  Some of the guests had been asked to bring along some school slates, and at the start of the séance Davey placed a piece of chalk on one of them and put the slate under one corner of the table, with the edges protruding. He then held one edge and invited a member of the group to grasp the opposite side. Pushing the slate tightly against the underside of the table, Davey asked the spirits, ‘Will you do anything for us?’ Within a few moments some mysterious scratching sounds were heard, and when the slate was withdrawn the word ‘Yes’ was clearly written across its surface.

  Encouraged by his success, Davey moved onto the second part of the séance. After the group had searched the room for any evidence of trickery, he extinguished the gaslights, and asked everyone to hold hands and join him in summoning the spirits. Slowly, a pale blue light materialized over Davey’s head. The light then developed into a full-form apparition that one guest later described as ‘frightful in its ugliness’. After this spirit had faded into the darkness, a second streak of light appeared and slowly developed into ‘a bearded man of Oriental appearance’. This new spirit bowed and moved just a few feet from those present, its complexion was ‘not dusky, but very white; the expression was vacant and listless’. The spirit then floated high into the air, and vanished through the ceiling.

  Night after night people left Davey’s house convinced that they had made contact with the spirit world. In reality, Davey did not possess the ability to summon the spirits. Instead, he was a conjuror who had used his magical expertise to fake all of the phenomena. However, unlike almost all of the other fake mediums of his day, Davey was not interested in fame or fortune. Instead, his guests had been unsuspecting participants in an elaborate and cleverly conceived experiment.

  In Davey’s day, many mediums claimed to be able to make the deceased write on school slates and materialize in front of people’s eyes. Those attending these demonstrations frequently found them convincing and came away certain that the soul survived bodily death. Davey was deeply sceptical and believed that the public were being fooled and fleeced by unscrupulous con artists. There was, however, one small problem. Many of the people attending the séances described witnessing incredible phenomena that couldn’t have been caused by trickery. Davey decided to conduct his own fake séances to discover what was going on.

  In the same way that Korem learned to replicate Hydrick’s tricks, so Davey schooled himself in the devious ways of fake mediumship. Night after night Davey performed for his unsuspecting guinea pigs, and then asked each of them to send him a written account of the evening. He asked them to make their testimony as complete as possible and describe everything that they could remember. He was stunned to discover that people frequently forgot or misremembered information that was central to his trickery.

  The slate-writing demonstration is a good example. Before the séance Davey attached a small piece of chalk to a thimble and slipped it into his pocket. When one of his guests took out a slate Davey slipped the thimble onto his finger. Then, when the slate was held beneath the table Davey wrote the word ‘yes’ on the underside. He then removed the slate and, by showing the upper face only, confirmed that there was no message. As the slate was replaced under the table, Davey turned the slate over, ensuring that the writing was now pushed against the underside of the table. When it was removed a second time, the word ‘Yes’ had mysteriously appeared. When participants later described the demonstration, the all-important removal and replacement of the slate vanished from their memories, with the guests firmly believing that the slate was placed under the table and had remained there until the spirit writing appeared.

  There were also the alleged materializations. Before the guests arrived Davey hid a large amount of fake spirit apparatus in one of his dining room cupboards. Before extinguishing the gaslight, he invited the group to thoroughly search the séance room. When he saw someone about to look in the cupboard containing his spirit stash, he quickly diverted their attention by inviting them to search him for any hidden paraphernalia. When the room was plunged into darkness, Davey’s trusted friend, Mr Munro, quietly sneaked into the room, retrieved the objects hidden in the cupboard, and used them to fake various spirit forms. The ‘apparition of frightful ugliness’ was a mask draped in muslin and treated with luminous paint, while the ‘bearded Oriental’ was the result of Munro dressing up (‘a turban was fixed upon my head, a theatrical beard covered my chin, muslin drapery hung about my shoulders’) and illuminating his face with a weak phosphorescent light. Munro later noted that though ‘the pallor of my face was due to flour, “the vacant and listless expression” is natural to me’. To create the illusion that the spirit levitated and then vanished, Munro stood on the back of Davey’s chair, lifted the light high above his head, and extinguished it when he reached the ceiling. In the same way that people misremembered the slate writing, so they were convinced that they had thoroughly searched Davey’s dining room and completely forgot that they had not looked inside one of the cupboards.

  In 1887 Davey published a 110-page dossier cataloguing a huge number of these errors, and concluded that people’s memories for apparently impossible events cannot be trusted. The report caused a sensation.7 Many leading Spiritualists, including the co-creator of the theory of evolution Alfred Russel Wallace, refused to believe Davey’s findings.8 Desperate to find out how all of his tricks were performed, Wallace declared that unless all of the fakery was explained, he would be forced to conclude that Davey possessed genuine mediumistic powers and was deceiving the public by instead claiming to be a magician. Davey contracted typhoid fever and died in December 1890, aged just 27. Soon after his death, Munro and others explained how they had faked all of the phenomena, but Wallace still didn’t accept it.9 In a long article he presented detailed descriptions of other séances that he had attended wherein such trickery would have been impossible. Davey’s supporters noted that there was no reason to believe that Wallace’s testimony was any more accurate than the ones produced by those attending Davey’s fake séances.

  Air-brushing the Past

  Davey’s findings are an astonishing example of the fifth and final principle used by Hydrick and other fake psychics to fool the world. Many people think that human observation and memory work like a video recorder or film camera. Nothing could be further from the truth. Take a look at the picture below of two people sitting at a table.10

  In a moment, I would like you to turn over the page and look at a second picture. Although the new picture will appear very similar to the one below, a large part of the image has been altered. Try to spot the change. To make things as fair as possible, feel free to flick between the two pictures. OK, away you go.

  Most people struggle to identify the difference, even though it is staring them in the face. If you haven’t spotted it, let me put you out of your misery. In the second picture the bar at the back of the photograph is much lower. Don’t feel upset if you didn’t spot the change. In fact, the vast majority of people struggle to see it. Psychologists refer to this rather curious phenomenon as ‘change blindness’ and the effect is a direct result of the way in which your visual processing system works.

  When you first saw the picture you probably had the feeling that you were seeing all of it in a single instant. This is a compelling illusion generated by your brain. In reality, the ability to form such an instantaneous perception would take a massive amount of brainpower. Rather than evolve a head the size of a planet,
your brain uses a simple shortcut to create the feeling of instantaneous perception. At any one moment, your eyes and brain only have the processing power to look at a very small part of your surroundings. To make up for this somewhat myopic view of the world, your eyes unconsciously dart from one place to another, rapidly building up a fuller picture of what is in front of you. In addition, to help ensure that precious time and energy aren’t wasted on trivial details, your brain quickly identifies what it considers to be the most significant aspects of your surroundings, and focuses almost all of its attention on these elements.

  Conceptually, it is as if you are standing in a darkened sweet shop with a torch, and getting a rough idea of what sweets are on the shelves by quickly moving the beam from one spot to another, and then concentrating on the jars that hold your favourite kinds of confectionery. However, rather than letting you know that you are not looking at the entirety of your surroundings in an instant, your brain pieces together an image based on its initial scan of the area and presents you with the comfortable feeling of constantly being aware of what is going on around you.

  In the case of the picture, eye tracking studies show that the bar receives scant attention, with most people focusing on the faces of the two people (with around 55 per cent of people wondering what on earth the woman sees in the guy). However, despite this selective looking, your visual system provides you with the impression that you are constantly seeing the entire picture, thus explaining why you could not spot the difference.

  This process is taking place every moment of your waking life. Your brain is constantly choosing what it believes to be the most significant aspects of your surroundings and paying very little attention to everything else. By making important actions seem unimportant, fake psychics are able to use this principle to make key aspects of their performance vanish from spectators’ minds. For example, when Davey first withdrew the slate from under the table he seemed to be checking for a spirit message. Because of this the movement of the slate seemed unimportant and so was quickly forgotten by his guests. Similarly, when performing his stunts, Hydrick would briefly glance at the objects, secretly blow and then look away. Because the glance seemed so trivial, people would forget about it and later be convinced that Hydrick looked away from the objects throughout his demonstrations.

  The first four principles of psychic deception – selling the duck, taking the road less travelled, covering your tracks, and changing the route – ensure that people do not figure out the solution to the tricks that are happening right in front of their eyes. The fifth principle – air-brushing the past – ensures that they are unable to accurately remember what happened. Without spectators realizing it, important details vanish from their minds and they are then left with no rational way of explaining what they have witnessed.

  THE GURU AND THE REFRIGERATOR

  A few years ago a colleague and I travelled to India to investigate top Godman Swami Premananda.11 Born in 1951, Premananda claims that his religious calling became apparent when he was a teenager and a saffron-coloured robe suddenly materialized on his body. Since then, Premananda has performed his alleged miracles on an almost daily basis, materializing objects in his bare hands and regularly regurgitating egg-shaped stones. In the early 1980s Premananda established a religious retreat in a remote part of Southern India, and at the time of our visit this self-contained village was home to the guru and about 50 of his followers. Drawn from across the world, this merry band of devoted disciples were convinced that their leader's miracles were genuine and had dedicated their lives to his teachings.

  My initial glimpse of Premananda was somewhat strange. On the first day of our visit I went to the retreat shop to buy a cold drink. The owner said that unfortunately his refrigerator had broken and that he was waiting for Premananda to solve the problem. I instantly conjured up a mental image of Premananda's followers cramped into a meeting hall with their guru leading the group in refrigerator-based prayer. A few moments later the shop door swung open and in walked Premananda clutching a bag of tools. The Swami yanked the refrigerator away from the wall, took a spanner out of his bag, and started tinkering away at the back of the machine. Within minutes the refrigerator burst into life. Sensing that his work here was done, Premananda quickly re-packed his tools, bought a chocolate bar, and left.

  That afternoon we were informed that Premananda would meet us at six o'clock the following morning to demonstrate his paranormal powers. Early the next morning I dragged myself off the wooden plank that constituted my bed and made my way to the meeting hall. Six o'clock came and went. As did seven o'clock, followed by eight o'clock. It seemed that Premananda was playing the 'guru game'; testing our level of devotion by arriving several hours after an agreed time. (When I play the same game with my students it is referred to as 'unprofessional behaviour'.) After four hours waiting in an increasingly hot and sticky hall, I decided that enough was enough and made my way towards the exit. As if by magic, the door swung open and in walked Premananda, surrounded by a small group of followers.

  The Godman smiled and quickly made a sweeping motion with his hand. A small stream of 'vibhuti' - a fine ash used in Hindu worship - started to trickle from his fingertips. A few moments later the ash ceased and Premananda appeared to pluck two small gold trinkets from thin air. Miracles over, I handed my Polaroid camera to one of the devotees and suggested that we all step outside for a group photograph. The resulting image clearly showed an odd purple haze surrounding the group and two additional blobs of purple directly above Premananda and me. Premananda looked at the photograph and modestly pointed out that many religions associated the shade of purple with sainthood.

  Careful observation of the guru at work suggested that he had hidden the objects that he miraculously found in the folds of his garment, and was secretly picking them up when people weren't watching. When we eliminated the possibility of this by placing a clear plastic bag around his hand, the materializations suddenly dried up.

  And what about the purple haze on the photograph of Premananda? When I returned to Britain I took the photograph to the Polaroid laboratories. The technician explained that when a Polaroid photograph is ejected from the camera, pouches containing developing chemicals are broken and the chemicals are dragged across the image. The technician then looked at the code number on the back of my photograph, consulted a big book of numbers, and revealed that the chemicals would have been past their sell-by date and therefore prone to a purplish discolouration. As a result, the scientific community has been reluctant to view the image as compelling evidence of sainthood. Personally, I am more convinced.

  Field footage of the Premananda test

  www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/Premenanda.html

  Davey’s ground-breaking work constitutes the very first experiment into the reliability of eyewitness testimony. Since then, psychologists have carried out hundreds of such studies that have demonstrated that the same type of selective memory clouds our ability to recall everyday events.

  Around the turn of the last century, German criminologist Professor von Lizst conducted some dramatic studies on the subject.12 One such study was staged during one of von Lizst‘s lectures and began with him discussing a book on criminology. One of the students (actually a stooge) suddenly shouted out and insisted that von Lizst explore the book from ‘the standpoint of Christian morality’. A second student (another stooge) objected and a fierce argument ensued. The situation went from bad to worse: the two stooges started to trade punches and eventually, one of them pulled out a revolver. Professor von Lizst tried to grab the weapon and a shot rang out. One of the students then fell to the ground and lay motionless on the floor.

  Professor von Lizst called a halt to the proceedings, explained that the whole thing was a set-up, had his two stooges take a bow, and quizzed everyone about the event. Von Lizst was amazed to discover that many of his students had become fixated on the gun (a phenomenon that psychologists now refer to as ‘weapon focus’) and
so, without realizing it, had forgotten much of what had happened just a few moments before, including who started the argument and the clothing that the protagonists were wearing.

  In the 1970s psychologist Rob Buckhout conducted a similar experiment, staging mock assaults in front of over 150 witnesses.13 Again, the witnesses tended to focus on what they thought was important – the nature of the assault – and so failed to remember much other information about the incident. When they were later shown six photographs and asked to identify the perpetrator, almost two-thirds of them failed to do so. On another occasion an American television programme broadcast footage of a mock purse-snatching incident and then asked viewers to try to identify the thief from a six-person lineup. Over 2,000 people called the programme and registered their decision. Even though the footage clearly showed the face of the assailant, just over 1,800 of the viewers identified the wrong person.14