Michael Prescott's Blog

Derren Brown part deux

I watched another YouTube video of mentalist Derren Brown. In this one he pretends to have the mystical power to convert atheists to religious belief with just a touch.

We see him address a small group of people somewhere in New England. One young woman describes herself as a nonbeliever in anything religious or spiritual. Brown then gently places his hand to her head for a few seconds. When he removes his hand and asks if she's still skeptical, she says tearfully that she now understands what her grandmother meant when she talked about getting a hug from God.

The video is titled "Instant Conversion," because that's what we're allegedly seeing.

Now, there are two possibilities here. One is that this woman was already primed to believe, regardless of her conscious denials, and all it took for her to be converted was the right stimulus.

The other possibility is that it's all fake. In this regard, it's worth considering a comment left on YouTube by someone with the screen name "dumani." He is Turkish, and his English is a tad shaky, but he gets his point across [my emphases in bold; some minor typos corrected]:

okay that girl joined DBs show one more time in England. Derren says no actors but this girls joins second time. First one was mind reading and that girl was reading mind or that girl's mind was being read.

What a chance that girl is now in America and her acting is really B.A.D... Even I am from Turkey I can understand this. Normaly I believe DB is not a Liar. I WANT TO believe this. However after seeing this I can not. I hope someone makes explanation here...

Maybe he's wrong, and it was two different girls who resemble each other. Or maybe not. Dumani posted this comment two weeks ago. So far, no one has responded to his point, though we do find a skeptic saying, "This guy [Brown] rules."

But does he play by the rules?

I feel a cold (reading) coming on

Someone sent me a link to a YouTube video in which a British mentalist (a fake medium) fools an audience into thinking he is for real. I was asked for my reaction.

Before we proceed, why don't you take a look at the five-minute video and see what you think? I'll wait right here.

...

dum de dum dum de dum dum

...

Okay, you're back. Were you impressed? For the most part, I wasn't.

My opinion of the demonstration is that it is standard cold/warm reading. The mentalist, Derren Brown, mainly asks leading questions (cold reading) and makes general comments or comments based on the sitter's appearance (warm reading).

For instance, he gives very common names like Charlie and Paul/Paula/Paulette, without any indication of who these people are. Most people have known a Charlie or a Paul.

When reading a woman who responds to the Paula/Paulette name, he waits for her to tell him that it's her deceased mom. Then he says the mom died fairly young, in her 50s or 60s. This is a safe guess, since the sitter is young. He says the mom was artistic, creative. Most women are "creative" in some way, so this is also a safe bet. He says the mom was "elegant." He probably bases this on the way the sitter is dressed and groomed. People tend to reflect their parents in these ways.

Then he gets even more general. There is "guilt," he says. He doesn't say who is guilty or why. In any parent-child relationship there will be some element of guilt, especially if the parent is dead. He says the mom and daughter didn't connect when the daughter was growing up. Don't most teens feel that their parents fail to understand them?

He says that things were left unsaid and undone - another cliche, since things are always left unfinished when a person dies, especially if he or she dies relatively young. He says the sitter was a teen when her mom died; this again is a safe bet, given the sitter's present age and the age at which her mom passed.

Finally he says that the mom's message is an apology and that she is here to reach out. The first statement is vague, since we don't know what the apology is for. The second is a truism; the only reason for a dead person to appear at a seance would be to reach out to the living.

There are two elements in the video that puzzle me. The first is minor. Brown says that the sitter's dad is also deceased. Unless the reading has been heavily edited, he does not seem to have fished for that info. It could be a lucky guess. He has a decent shot at being right, and if he is wrong, he can say he sees a "father figure" and make it into a grandfather, uncle, etc.

The other poser is Brown's statement in the first reading that he sees an image of an elevator, which turns out to be highly meaningful to the sitter. This is the only element of either of the two readings that would normally seem evidential. I can't explain it, except to point out that all he actually says is that he's seeing an elevator. He does not say that the deceased person is on the elevator, or that it was a dream. These details are supplied by the sitter. Still, of all the images he could have picked, why an elevator? It could be a) a pure lucky guess, b) an image that recurs frequently in people's dreams and is therefore a fairly safe bet, or c) an example of genuine, perhaps unconscious psychic ability, which the mentalist misinterprets as plain intuition.

Not being a skeptic or a rationalist, I don't claim to have all the answers, so I can't explain the elevator. The rest of it, though, is a pretty run-of-the-mill mentalist act. The audience members were overly credulous to be taken in by these leading questions and vague generalities. If you compare this to one of John Edward's better sittings (and not all of them are good), you'll see a clear difference. At his best, Edward gives many more specifics, without prompting. For examples, see my essays on Edward.

I might add that Derren Brown is not operating under controlled conditions. Let's see how well he does in a setup like this.

Early mediums like Leonora Piper and Gladys Leonard were tested in proxy sittings, in which they were asked for information relating to a deceased person whom no one in the room had ever known. This approach rules out cold reading, since the sitters cannot give away information they don't have. If the information is specific enough, warm reading is ruled out, as well. And since the visits were unannounced, there was no opportunity for hot reading (advance research) either.

When mentalists can duplicate what mediums do under controlled conditions, skeptics will have a point. So far that day hasn't come.

Recalling Ford

Here's an interesting incident related in Allen Spraggett's book Arthur Ford: The Man who Talked with the Dead. It is told by Theodore Tiemeyer, a minister who developed an interest in parapsychology and had several seances with Ford.

When I was a student in Eden Seminary I often attended the first Congregational Church of Webster Grove, Missouri. The minister there sometimes lectured at the seminary. Outside of these contacts I did not know anything about him. His name was Irvine E. Inglis, pronounced "Ing-les." The information I received about him in later years was that his first wife died of cancer, and later, that he had remarried, this time [to] a woman who had served him as a part-time secretary.

In 1966 I received a message in a Ford sitting from this man. Fletcher [Ford's spirit control], said, "This man" -- he gave the name, "Inglis," and pronounced it both ways -- "says his first name was Peter."

I said I knew a Dr. Inglis but not named Peter. Nevertheless, Fletcher said his name was Peter. He said he had lectured in the school I attended, and said his first wife was with him on the other side. He had become interested in spirit communication before he passed on, Fletcher said. He mentioned that he had read the book A Life After Death, by Ralph Harlow and a book by a Canadian whose name he could not recall but which he thought was "Alfred."

He had marked something in that second book, he said, a poem which meant something to him. Also, he had passed over rather suddenly and wanted to communicate with his second wife and tell her that all was well.

Well, I didn't know if any of this was correct, but I checked it out. I contacted a former professor at Eden Seminary whom I knew and he contacted the second Mrs. Inglis, the minister's widow.

She said she had become interested in the psychic field herself. She said she couldn't recall a book in her husband's library by Ralph Harlow, but there was one with a red binding by a Canadian named Albert -- not Alfred -- Cliffe. In this book, Dr. Inglis had not only underlined many passages but had marked a poem and written under it, "This is I." The poem was about the disciple Peter. [Italics in original]

This poem was republished in a memorial put out by the church in Webster Grove. It seems that Dr. Inglis wanted to be identified with Peter.

Later, I found that Dr. Inglis' son, a minister, was named Peter. He said the message was entirely in keeping with his father as he knew him. He said it was a family trait to pronounce the family name both ways -- as the communicator had done through Fletcher -- because people assumed the more common pronunciation was the correct one. Also, he said it had been the custom of his father's intimate friends to call him Peter. [Pages 234-236]

Spraggett comments:

In this message, it seemed to Mr. Tiemeyer, and it will to many other students of psychic experiences, that the purported communicator had succeeded in imprinting the stamp of his personality. What came across was not only a very specific reference to a particular book, and a poem within that book -- with the author's name half-forgotten, which is typical of the way memory acts here, and, presumably, hereafter -- but, more important, the "feel" of an identifiable human being, including his predilection for a name other than his official one.

Although there is little doubt that Arthur Ford did sometimes engage in trickery, incidents like this one strongly suggest that he had legitimate psychic abilities.

A Thanksgiving turkey

One of the advantages of belonging to Netflix is that you can track down and rent movies you've always meant to see but never got around to seeing. The downside of this policy is that some of these movies turn out to be really, really bad.

Case in point: Fight Club.

This 1999 drama, or comedy, or whatever the hell it's supposed to be, got some pretty favorable reviews. And it features two high-powered actors, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. So I figured, how bad can it be? Answer: bad enough that 40 minutes of this dreck was all I could take before hitting the eject button on my DVD's remote control.

I'm not sure exactly when I began to realize that I was watching a truly awful motion picture, but I think it may have been the scene where a dying cancer patient tearfully tells a support group than in the brief time she has left, all she wants to do is "get laid." What's inexcusable about this scene is that it's clearly intended to get a laugh. That's right -- we the audience are expected to find the woman's plight amusing, to snicker at her comical desperation for one last experience of intimate human contact. (The fact that the narrator describes the painfully gaunt woman as resembling "Meryl Streep's skeleton" is a tipoff.)

Laughing at cancer patients is in pretty bad taste, to be sure, but Fight Club is a movie that revels in bad taste and in sheer ugliness for its own sake. It abounds in jokes about terrorism and death and violence and sexual impotence and disfiguring medical conditions and plane crashes and how much blood a person can swallow before passing out. Yes, it's a laugh riot.

Around the time that I decided I'd had enough of Fight Club, I took down the two movie guides on my bookshelf to see what they had to say about this cinematic abortion. Leonard Maltin disappointed me, rating the movie an overly generous two stars out of four. But the other book, the less well-known Video and DVD Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, nailed the film dead-on. In fact, I have to say that this is the single most accurate movie review I have ever read in my life, and I am therefore going to reproduce it in its entirety:

If Director David Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls intended to make us believe that we haven't advanced a jot  from the putrescent slime that once may have spawned mankind, they succeeded brilliantly. This appalling, grotesque, and interminable endurance test is fairy-tale fiction for serial killers, imbeciles who succumb to road rage, and frustrated white guys: all the morons who seek excuses to justify their increasingly bad behavior and hair-trigger tempers. Proceed with caution.

The Video and DVD Guide rates movies on a scale from five stars (excellent) to "turkey" (symbolized by a little silhouetted turkey). Fight Club earns the latter rating, of course. So it looks like I got my Thanksgiving meal a little early.

Too bad it wasn't easier to swallow.

---

P.S. Two other notable reviews are cited in the Wikipedia entry on the film. Roger Ebert called it "macho porn," and Rex Reed found it "a film without  a single redeeming quality, which may have to find its audience in Hell."

Thanksgiving thoughts

I guest-posted on my agent's blog today, giving my "Thanksgiving Thoughts."

It's a warm, fuzzy piece.

Next up: "Puppies: How Cute are They?"

On a lighter note ...

... after my last post, here's a hot new children's toy.

Wouldn't you like to be the proud parent of the tot who finds this gift under the Christmas tree?

Hat tip: Ace of Spades.

Draft horses, not people

In an astonishing act of stupidity, the incoming Democratic Congress has decided to introduce itself to the public by calling for a resumption of the military draft - this time dressed up as "national service," which would be more "comprehensive" and would include various forms of "social service" in addition to the military kind.

Actually it's not fair to blame this remarkable development on the whole Democratic Congress, since it is really the brainchild of a single congressman, the eccentric Charles Rangel, soon to chair the Ways & Means Committee. Restoring the draft has been a pet project of Rangel's for some time - though when the Republicans allowed the idea to come up for a vote, almost every member of Congress voted against it. Including (you guessed it) Charlie Rangel himself.

If you think Rangel's vote against his own proposal indicates he is not entirely serious about it, you're probably right. Truth is, it's hard to know what's going on in Rangel's peculiar mind. It's like trying to figure out what Michael Richards thought he was doing when he started yelling the n-word on a comedy club stage. No doubt he had some intention that seemed reasonable to him at the time, but it is probably a wasted effort to determine what it was.

What's more interesting than Rangel's proposed bill, which will go nowhere, is the fact that some on the left actually do seem to support a return to conscription. This is odd, since opposition to the draft was the defining feature of the 1960s-era politics that forged contemporary liberalism. Meanwhile conservatives, who mostly supported the draft in the Vietnam years, are almost all opposed to it now. I think there are several reasons for this turnaround.

First, some liberals harbor an unhealthy nostalgia for the '60s - the sit-ins, the love-ins, the marches, the whole counterculture atmosphere. They want a return to those days, and since the draft was a big part of the picture, they want a return to the draft, as well. This doesn't make much sense, but as Woody Allen observed in another context, the heart wants what it wants.

Second, some liberals just cannot wrap their minds around the fact that the people who volunteer for military duty really do want to serve. To their way of thinking, there is no way anyone would ever willingly submit to the hardships and hazards of military life. Ergo, today's soldiers must be volunteers in name only. They are "really" being forced into the military by economic privation. In support of this thesis, liberals like Rangel (and John Kerry) trot out the shopworn claim that our soldiers are disproportionately drawn from the ranks of disadvantaged, poorly educated minorities. This has not been true for decades; the educational level of the US military today is actually higher than that of the civilian population, and the racial breakdown includes a disproportionately high number of Caucasians (minorities are slightly underrepresented). But facts don't stand in the way of feelings.

Third, there's some strange equalitarian notion of "fairness." In this view, it is unfair to let people choose to join the military or not join, but very fair to force them into the military against their will. We see a similar concept of fairness in the liberal approach to education (it's unfair to let people choose their schools, but fair to force them into bad schools) and health care (unfair to let people choose their doctors, fair to force them into crappy HMOs) and economics (unfair to let people choose to shop at Wal-Mart, fair to force them to shop at higher-priced stores). I think the underlying assumption is that most people, who are not nearly as smart as congressmen and college professors, can't be trusted to make intelligent choices, so it is best for them to be allowed no choices at all.

Fourth, there's the idea that wars are fought at the bidding of the super-rich, using the sons of the poor as cannon fodder. If the sons of the rich were on the front lines, so goes this line of thinking, there would be no more wars. This ignores the fact that for most of American history, the sons of the rich were on the front lines, and there were still plenty of wars. Rich men's kids served in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI, and WWII. (Joe Kennedy, Jr., was killed in the Second World War, and John Kennedy served on PT-109 .) They served in Korea (remember that rich doctor on M*A*S*H?) and even in Vietnam (hello, John Kerry). US casualties in all these wars were orders of magnitude higher than in more recent conflicts like the Gulf War, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. If the "sons of the rich" thesis were true, one would expect to see higher casualties now that the rich can opt out and only the "poor" are left to fight. Why would heartless war profiteers care about the lives of cannon fodder? Instead we see the opposite - the lowest casualty rates in the history of warfare, with constant efforts to drop them lower still. 

Finally, I think many liberals care less about military conscription than about the "social service" part of the program. Forcing every eighteen-year-old to carry bedpans in a nursing home or to bus trays at a soup kitchen will instill an attitude of "commitment" to "public service" and to "giving something back." As I interpret it, this means kids will be indoctrinated in the notion of government service as the be-all and end-all of life. "Ask not what your country can do for you," JFK rather ominously advised, "but what you can do for your country." His admirers have taken him at his word. These days most of us spend half our working lives producing revenue for the local, state, and federal governments, but according to the more statist liberals, it's still not nearly enough. Why, the government is simply starved of money and manpower. Famished, actually!  So why not give more money (let's raise taxes) and more time (let's institute national service) to our government masters? The poor dears are simply wasting away for lack of "resources."

As you have guessed by now, I am no fan of Charlie Rangel's proposal (and, if one can judge by his voting record, neither is he). I don't want government further limiting people's choices and imposing itself even more deeply into their lives. I don't want a return to the draft, whether for military service or social service. I don't pine for the glory days of the 1960s - which were, as I remember them, a very bad time in American history, with the nation rent by the violence of political, generational, and racial conflict.

Nor do most people, and the smarter Democrats know it, which is why Rangel's idea will be allowed to quietly die. All he's accomplished is to make himself look foolish and make the new Congress look weird. And to remind people that politicians are no wiser than the rest of us, and frequently less so.

Blog alert!

On his  blog Science Is a Method, Not a Position, Matthew Cromer has a fascinating report on a recent telephone reading with medium Marcel Cairo. The results were very impressive. I especially like the "brown-eyed girl" reference.

Regular readers know that both Matthew and Marcel have posted valuable comments on this blog.

Toes a-poppin'

The modern popular interest in seances, channeling, etc. may well have originated with Kate and Maggie Fox, two sisters who seemed able to summon and communicate with spirits.

The Fox sisters, who lived in the small rural town of Hydesville in upstate New York, were the nexus of a series of bizarre phenomena that started in the late winter of 1848, when loud raps were persistently heard throughout the Foxes' farmhouse. On March 31, 1848, events came to a head. The Haunted Museum provides a nice summary of that memorable night:

[The girls' father, John] Fox began his almost nightly ritual of investigating the house for the source of the sounds. The tapping had begun with the setting of the sun and although he searched the place, he was no closer to a solution. Then, Kate began to realize that whenever her father knocked on a wall or door frame, the same number of inexplicable knocks would come in reply. It was as if someone, or something, was trying to communicate with them.

Finding her nerve, Kate spoke up, addressing the unseen presence by the nickname that she and her sister had given it. "Here, Mr. Splitfoot," she called out, "do as I do!" She clapped her hands together two times and seconds later, two knocks came in reply, seemingly from inside of the wall. She followed this display by rapping on the table and the precise number of knocks came again from the presence. The activity caught the attention of the rest of the family and they entered the room with Kate and her father. Mrs. Fox tried asking aloud questions of fact, such as the ages of her daughters and the age of a Fox child who had earlier passed away. To her surprise, each reply eerily accurate.

Unsure of what to do, John Fox summoned several neighbors to the house to observe the phenomenon. Most of them came over very skeptical of what they were hearing from the Foxes, but were soon astounded to find their ages and various dates and years given in response to the questions they asked.

One neighbor, and a former tenant in the house, William Duesler, decided to try and communicate with the source of the sounds in a more scientific manner. He asked repeated questions and was able to create a form of alphabet using a series of knocks. He also was able to determine the number of knocks that could be interpreted as "yes" and "no". In such a manner, he was able to determine the subject of the disturbances. The answer came, not in private, but before an assembled group of witnesses, that the presence in the house was the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered and robbed years before.

Later some skull fragments were recovered from the cellar, suggesting that possibly someone had been buried there. Many years after the fact, part of the basement wall collapsed, and more skeletal remains were discovered. But if the remains were indeed those of a murder victim, he was never identified. The name given by the raps, Charles B. Rosma, was widely publicized but never verified as belonging to any actual person.

In any event, Kate and Maggie, along with their older sister Leah, became celebrities of a sort, and embarked on a career as professional mediums. Their story is well told in a recent book, Barbara Weisberg's Talking to the Dead, and is neatly summarized by Troy Taylor of the Haunted Museum in two parts (part one and part two).

Along the way, Kate and Maggie fell on hard times, became alcoholics, and eventually recanted their claims of psychic powers, saying that their act was fraudulent. Still later, they withdrew their confessions and said they had been pressured into admitting to fraud in exchange for monetary compensation. The affair is still controversial.

To me, the most remarkable thing about the Fox sisters is the claim made by some skeptics then and now, and by Maggie herself in her public confession. This claim was that the girls produced the raps by cracking the joints of their toes.

As a side note, I remember reading a skeptical explanation of the table raps made at many seances (possibly in M. Lamar Keene's The Psychic Mafia, though offhand I'm not sure). The explanation was that a fraudulent medium can simply press his thumbnails together and make a loud clicking noise, which, supposedly, will sound just like a hard rap. Maybe Shakespeare had this sort of thing in mind when he had one of Macbeth's witches say, "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."

Now, maybe I'm missing something here, but I have always found these claims a bit hard to understand. I have tried clicking and pricking my thumbs, and all I can produce is a soft clickety-click that is nothing at all like a rap. As for cracking one's joints - well, I can't crack my toes, but I can crack my knuckles, and again the noises produced do not strike me as even vaguely similar to raps.

It's worth pointing out that numerous witnesses attested to the volume of the raps produced in the Fox sisters' presence. These were not soft clicks or pops. They were reportedly loud, dramatic sounds that in some cases actually caused the walls and floors to vibrate. Arthur Conan Doyle covers this aspect of the case in his comprehensive History of Spiritualism, which can be read online in its entirety (Volume One and Volume Two). Here is a typical account, drawn from Vol. I, Ch. 5:

Miss Rosamund Dale Owen also refers to the incident of the medium [Kate Fox] standing in the street at a shop window with two ladies, when raps joined in the conversation, the pavement vibrating under their feet. The raps are described as having been loud enough to attract the attention of passers by.

Many such reports were issued, some anecdotal, others the product of serious research. Witnesses consistently claimed, over a period of decades, that the noises were sometimes so loud as to reverberate through the room. Even when Maggie demonstrated her alleged toe-cracking technique to a sold-out auditorium, the noises produced could be heard clearly throughout the spacious hall.

Some people say the girls used a loose wooden board, such as a loose floorboard in the Hydesville farmhouse, to amplify the toe-hoint crackssounds. But it is hard to see how any such trick could produce the loud, sometimes thunderous raps reported by so many witnesses. Besides, the raps occurred even when the sisters were outdoors - for instance, standing on the sidewalk, as in Doyle's example above.

Furthermore, the sounds were often perceived to come from various locations far away from the girls. Skeptics say vaguely that the girls used "ventriloquism" to pull this off.

There is also the additional fact that the raps often gave correct answers to questions that the girls probably could not have answered on their own. In some cases the raps reportedly answered purely mental questions posed by witnesses - questions, in other words, that the witnesses never asked aloud.

Assessing the case, Doyle posits a hypothesis that may deserve consideration. He suggests that the girls' feet - or toes - may well have played a role in the phenomena, but not such a simple role as the skeptics insist. He imagines that a physical medium must have "a centre of psychic force ... in some part of the body."

Supposing that centre to be in Margaret's foot, it would throw a very clear light upon the evidence collected in the Seybert inquiry [a medical investigation]. In examining Margaret and endeavouring to get raps from her, one of the committee, with the permission of the medium, placed his hand upon her foot. Raps at once followed. The investigator cried: "This is the most wonderful thing of all, Mrs. Kane. I distinctly feel them in your foot. There is not a particle of motion in your foot, but there is an unusual pulsation."

This experiment by no means bears out the idea of joint dislocation or snapping toes. It is, however, exactly what one could imagine in the case of a centre from which psychic power was projected. This power is in material shape and is drawn from the body of the medium, so that there must be some nexus. This nexus may vary. In the case quoted it was in Margaret's foot....

It is to be remembered that no one is more ignorant of how effects are produced than the medium, who is the centre of them.... Thus in the case of these Fox sisters, who were mere children when the phenomena began, they knew little of the philosophy of the subject, and Margaret frequently said that she did not understand her own results. If she found that she had herself some power of producing the raps, however obscure the way by which she did it, she would be in a frame of mind when she might well find it impossible to contradict [a skeptic] when he accused her of being concerned in it. Her confession, too, and that of her sister, would to that extent be true, but each would be aware, as they afterwards admitted, that there was a great deal more which could not be explained and which did not emanate from themselves.

I understand that skeptics will be content with the toe-cracking theory, especially since Maggie herself espoused it (despite her later retraction). But I would like to see someone with such snap-crackle-popping joints reproduce the effects that the Fox sisters obtained. I'd like to see someone, simply by cracking his fingers or toes, produce loud bangs and accompanying vibrations, indoors and outdoors, spontaneously and on demand, with the noises apparently occurring at a variety of distances. I'd like to see this person use these raps to correctly answer personal questions from strangers, and even to answer unvoiced questions. And I'd like to see this subterfuge carried out so expertly that it would fool hundreds of witnesses, including skeptical scientists and journalists, over a period of decades. 

Maybe it can be done. Personally, however, I'm of the mind that the toe-joint hypthesis isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Celebrity alert!

Kristin Brewe, the creator-writer of those animated Esurance ads I praise in my immediately preceding post, actually joins us in the comments section.

This is the kind of thing that makes blogging worthwhile!

Check it out.

Then go buy some Esurance, dammit. It's the very least you can do.