Invited Speaker Series 2009-10
Abstracts and biographies
Autum term 2009
Date: 6/10/09
Speaker: Dr Cara Laney
Title: True vs. False Memories: Is There a Definitive Difference?
Abstract
If there were a way to reliably distinguish between true and false memory reports, eyewitness testimony could be made more trustworthy. Three studies will be discussed. In the first, participants were given false memories for a positive event to see whether these memories, like true memories, might have repercussions. The second study was designed to assess whether demand characteristics could explain the results of false memory studies. In the final study, some participants were given false memories for three different emotional childhood events. Other participants had pre-existing (presumably true) memories for the same three events. The emotionality of the true and false memories was then compared, to see whether emotional content might be a reliable signal of memory accuracy.
Biography
Dr Cara Laney is a lecturer of forensic psychology at the University of Leicester. She completed her PhD at the University of California in 2006, working with Elizabeth Loftus. Her main area of research is human memory and the myriad ways it can go wrong. Besides giving participants false memories for a variety of consequential and emotional events, to show that even meaningful and emotional memories can be false memories, she has experimented with the memory altering powers of moral judgments and visual system tricks. She has published more than a dozen journal articles in the field of memory.
Date: 27/10/09
Speaker: Anonymous
Title: The Good Daughter: When an Adult Recovers “Memories” of Parental Child Sexual Abuse, How can the Rest of the Family Assess the Charge?
Abstract
Sex, rape, innocence, betrayal, childhood and fear of mortality – an objective response to allegations of childhood sexual abuse in the context of recovered “memory” by adults is arguably impossible, stirring up, as it does, so many fears, vested interests and conflicting conscious and unconscious emotions. The speaker will describe how being the sibling of an accuser affected her sense of identity and wider family relationships. She will explore the psychological impact of trying to apply objectivity to a personal crisis and describe the fall-out of an unresolved accusation.
The speaker proposes that people recoil from explanations of false memory where the recovered “memory” is of child sex abuse. Various factors shape this response. These include: widespread confusion over the functioning of memory; fascination with multiple personality disorder played out literally via works of fiction; natural horror at the thought of the alleged crime; a projected identification with the “recovered” child; terror of being on the wrong side if the allegation turns out to be true; and societal guilt for downplaying rape as a crime. These factors and many more play a part in building a landscape which victimifies [sic] the accuser and criminalises the accused regardless of context and outcome. Even when an accuser later retracts an allegation, case reports show even trained healthcare professionals becoming aggressive and accusing the retractor of lying.
Biography
The speaker is a member of a research ethics committee, volunteers with a carers’ association and works professionally as a freelance writer. In the healthcare field, she has written patient information leaflets for an NHS Trust, edited papers and presentations as well as facilitating numerous educational meetings for GPs and specialists.
Date: 10/11/09
Speaker: Professor Chris French
Title: Something Wicked This Way Comes: Causes and Interpretations of Sleep Paralysis
Abstract
This presentation will describe the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, including numerous first-person accounts. In its most basic form, sleep paralysis simply involves being half-awake and half-asleep and realising that, for a short time, one cannot move. This experience is very common with around 40% of the population reporting that they have experienced it. Around one in twenty people report having experienced terrifying hallucinations during their episodes of sleep paralysis. The underlying psychophysiological causes of the fascinating phenomenon will be described, as will the different interpretations of the experience cross-culturally.
Biography
Chris French is Professor of Psychology and Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths. He has published over 100 articles and chapters covering a wide range of topics within psychology. His main current area of research is the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences. He frequently appears on radio and television casting a sceptical eye over paranormal claims. He is the editor of The Skeptic magazine (UK version).
Date:
24/11/09
Speaker: Dr Mark Vernon
Title: Happiness: The Failure of a New Science
Abstract
The new sciences of happiness are generating lots of advice on how to keep smiling. The results are even being explored by policy wonks. So why does so much of it – work less, say thanks, keep fit – sound so trite? If it were that easy, wouldn’t we all be happy by now? The reason is that a central and tricky question is being glossed over: just what is happiness? Moreover, how you try to promote happiness depends entirely on what you take happiness to be – and there’s a wealth of choice in that. The sadness is that this has all been considered before, though there seems to be widespread ignorance of the fact. It was Jeremy Bentham who set up the greatest happiness principle and in the very next generation, his godson and prodigy, John Stuart Mill, who ditched it. What Bentham hadn’t grasped is that if you go for happiness head on, you won’t find it. Happiness is a byproduct of life, not an organising principle. From this follows a devastating critique of the so-called measures of happiness: they rest on assessing the pleasure people experience, but of course life is far more than an increase of pleasure. A rich life of necessity will also include pain, perhaps very great pain. It’s also clear that there are no objective measures of happiness, but only correlations: brain scans rest first on what people say, to which the scan is linked, and what people say depends greatly on what you ask them in the first place. This is why other economists interested in wellbeing say the measures of happiness used today are far too immature to be used in policy decisions. The new science of happiness is actually doing us a profound disservice. Therein lies its failure.
Biography
Mark Vernon is a writer and journalist, recent books including The Philosophy of Friendship (Palgrave Macmillan), After Atheism (Palgrave Macmillan) and Wellbeing (Acumen). He writes for the Guardian and the TLS amongst others, is on the faculty at The School of Life and is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, London. He has degrees in physics and theology and a PhD in philosophy, and used to be a priest in the Church of England. He is a keen blogger with a website at http://www.markvernon.com
Date:
8/12/09
Speaker: Professor Bruce Hood
Title:
Supernatural Belief: Me or Memes?
Abstract
Where do we get our supernatural beliefs from? And why do some seem more plausible than others? Are we simply just gullible meme-machines or is there some intrinsic origin for the unbelievable? In this talk, I'll exam an idea that as part of our natural reasoning, humans will always generate misconceptions that could easily be fertile ground for believing in the supernatural. Maybe culture simply mirrors and resonates with what we individually believe or would like to believe as a group.
Biography
Professor Bruce Hood is currently the Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre in the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol. He has been a research fellow at Cambridge University and University College London, a visiting scientist at MIT and a faculty professor at Harvard. He has been awarded an Alfred Sloan Fellowship in neuroscience, the Young Investigator Award from the International Society of Infancy Researchers, the Robert Fantz memorial award and was recently voted to Fellowship status by the society of American Psychological Science. He currently holds grants from the Leverhulme Trust, the Medical Research Council, the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council to fund research into the origins of supernatural beliefs, the development of face and gaze processing, the development of inhibition and general cognitive development.
Spring term 2010
Date:
2/2/10
Speaker:
Dr
Emmanuelle Peters
Title: Understanding delusional
thinking: A scientist-practitioner perspective
“You’re trying to climb rain, Peter, or sweep sun off the
pavement”
(Retort from a man with psychosis in conversation with Peter
Chadwick, discussing his endeavours to investigate delusions. (Chadwick, 1992;
p. xiv))
True delusions are conventionally regarded as being “psychologically un-understandable” (Jaspers, 1913). This view will be challenged on three fronts. Firstly, work into schizotypy has suggested that symptoms of schizophrenia are at the extreme end of a continuum, which ranges from healthy functioning, through eccentricity, to florid psychosis. It will be demonstrated that delusions lie on a continuum with normal beliefs, and that their form may be more important diagnostically than their content. Secondly, several psychological conceptualisations of delusions will be presented, most of which agree that delusions share many characteristics with normal beliefs. Key models emphasise the importance of unusual experiences in driving delusional explanations, the role of appraisals in determining delusional outcome, as well as the presence of reasoning biases such as a “jump-to-conclusions” reasoning style. Experimental support for these models will be presented, in healthy delusion-prone people, undiagnosed individuals with anomalous experiences, and actively deluded patients. Lastly, the therapeutic implications of this work will be discussed in the context of recent developments for cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) for psychosis.
Dr Emmanuelle Peters is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. She is the Director of the Psychological Interventions Clinic for Outpatients with Psychosis (PICuP) service, based at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Dr Peters has specialised in psychosis for the last 20 years. She coordinates the Psychosis teaching on the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, and lectures regularly for other mental health professionals. Research interests include: continuity models of mental illness, including the link between psychosis and spirituality; psychological models of psychotic symptoms, specifically delusions and thought disturbances; and cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) for psychosis.
Date:
9/2/10
Speaker:
Nick Campion
Title:
How Many People Really Believe in
Astrology?
Normal figures for belief in astrology hover around 25% of the adult population and are usually based on Gallup polls. However, like all statistics, these depend on the manner in which questions are asked. The evidence suggests that levels of belief are much higher than Gallup suggests - perhaps 60% or above - if different questions are posed. This talk will examine the latest data and question whether the notion of ‘belief’ is responsible for distortions in the figures.
Nick Campion is senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology, History and Anthropology, Director of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture at the University of Wales, Lampeter and course-director of the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology. His recent books include the two-volume History of Western Astrology ; published by Continuum in 2008 and 9, and ‘What do Astrologers Believe? (London: Granta 2006). He is currently working on Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions, for publication by New York University Press.
Date:
23/2/10
Speaker: Dr Stephen Law
Title: Intellectual
Black Holes
How are smart, college-educated people able to convince themselves that, say, the universe is six thousand years old? This talk will look at some of the mechanisms used by religious and other belief systems to trap people inside, so that it's almost impossible for them to think their way out again.
Philosopher Stephen Law is the editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal THINK. He has published several books and is senior lecturer in philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London.
Date:
2/3/10
Speaker:
Dr Miguel Farias
Title:
Believing in the Da
Vinci Code: Social-Cognitive Predictors and Correlates
The success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code novel was astonishing, as was the number of number of people who actually took seriously Brown’s rewriting of Christian history. After watching one documentary on people who had read the novel and had believed most of its contents, despite counterevidence by experts, two colleagues (N. Tausch and A. Newheiser) and I devised a scale of Da Vinci Code beliefs and a social psychological experiment to test for some of the possible psychological predictors of these beliefs. This study was conducted with Oxford University students who had read the novel shortly before the release of the film. The results are quite telling both regarding cognitive and affective predictors of such beliefs. I also believe they can help us understand and, to a certain extent, predict the societal growth of magical related ideas.
Miguel Farias is a researcher and lecturer in psychology. His major research interest is in understanding how spiritual and religious beliefs affect the way in which we perceive the world and ourselves. He has studied the psychological characteristics of New Age believers and the neural correlates of religious belief in relation to the experience of pain. Currently, he is completing a research project on the motivations and experiences of pilgrims at Pagan and Christian sites across Europe.
Date:
9/3/10
Speaker:
Dr Gustav Kuhn
Title:
The Science of Magic: How Magic Changes our Expectations
About Autism
Over the centuries, magicians have learned how to perform acts that are perceived as defying the laws of nature, and that induce a strong sense of wonder. Many of the techniques used to create these illusions share similarities with topics investigated by psychologists. For example, magicians use misdirection to systematically orchestrate people’s attention so as to manipulate what they see. Misdirection may therefore provide us with valuable insights into visual attention and awareness. Alternatively, magicians may manipulate our perception through the use of illusions, which may provide insights into the effects of top-down processing on perception. In this talk I will draw parallels between magic and science, and demonstrate how these principles can be investigated scientifically. These studies have particularly highlighted the role of the magician’s social cues (i.e., gaze direction) in manipulating attention. I will also present eye-tracking data from the “vanishing ball illusion”, in which the magician’s gaze direction played a pivotal role in creating expectations that resulted in people perceiving an event that never took place.
In the final part I will demonstrate how this approach can be used to investigate atypicalities in visual processing in clinical populations. In the vanishing ball illusion, the magician’s social cues misdirect the audience’s expectations and attention into ‘seeing’ a ball vanish in the air. As individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are less sensitive to social cues, and have superior perception for non-social details, we predicted that they should be less susceptible to the illusion shown in a video-clip. Surprisingly, the opposite result was found, as individuals with ASD were more susceptible to the illusion than a comparison group. Eye-tracking data indicated that subtle temporal delays in allocating attention might explain their heightened susceptibility. Additionally, although ASD individuals showed typical patterns of looking to the magician's face and eyes, they were slower to launch their first saccade to the face, and had difficulty in fixating the fast moving observable ball. Considered together, the results indicate difficulties in the rapid allocation of attention towards both people and moving objects.
Gustav Kuhn completed his PhD at Sussex University in 2003, where he investigated implicit learning of musical structures, supervised by Zoltan Dienes. Towards the end of his PhD he started to collaborate with Michael Land and Benjamin Tatter by exploring the ways in which magicians can misdirect peoples’ attention. This was largely possible since, prior to his academic career, Gustav worked as a professional magician. It was at this point where he discovered the potential of using magic as a method for investigating a wide variety of cognitive processes. The focus of his research then naturally changed toward visual perception. In 2005 Gustav moved to Durham to work on a 1-year post doc investigating attentional capture, after which he was awarded a 3-year Wolfson fellowship enabling him to continue his research on the science of magic and in particular focusing on the way in which our attention is influenced by where others are looking. In 2009 he took up a position as a lecturer at Brunel University where he is currently teaching research methods.
Date:
16/3/10
Speaker: Professor Richard Wiseman
Title:
“Heads I win, tails you
lose”: How parapsychologists
nullify null results
This talks explores how parapsychologists often explain away evidence against the existence of psi, examining how null findings are ignored during exploratory research, how chance results obtained during attempted replication are attributed to non psi-conducive procedures, how post hoc data mining is used to identify pockets of significant data in meta-analyses that have yielded null results, and how the eventual decline of any alleged effects are viewed as an inherent property of psi. It is argued that understanding and preventing these problems are central to resolving debates about the existence of psychic ability.
Psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman currently holds Britain’s only Professorship in the public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. He frequently appears on the media, and has written over 60 academic articles and several books, including The Luck Factor (2003), and Quirkology (2007). Much of his research has examined the possible existence of psychic ability.
Date: 23/3/10
Speaker: Dr Sam
Parnia
Title: Near Death Experiences During Cardiac Arrest
One of the subjects that has both captivated and eluded humankind throughout time is the mystery of what happens when we die. Although traditionally a subject for philosophical or theological debate, scientific progress has begun to shed light on both the physiological as well as cognitive processes such as near death experiences that take place during clinical death. Dr. Sam Parnia, author of What Happens When We Die, chronicles the history and development of the study of cardiac arrest as well as near death experiences. At the same time, he will introduce the novel method he and his colleagues have devised to study the phenomenon of consciousness and the human mind at the end of life, which they hope will finally enable science to resolve the mystery of near death experiences.
One of the world’s leading experts on the scientific study of death, the state of the human mind-brain, and near-death experiences, Dr. Sam Parnia spends his time between hospitals in the United Kingdom and Cornell University in New York, where he is a Fellow in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. Founder of the Human Consciousness Project and Horizon Research Foundation, he has published extensively and presented his work at scientific institutions across the country. His groundbreaking research has been featured on the Discovery Channel documentary, The Day I Died.
Summer term 2010
Date: 18/5/10
Speaker: Peter
Brookesmith
Title: The Unextraordinary Oddity of Alan Godfrey’s ‘Alien Abduction’
The ‘abduction by aliens’ of police constable Alan Godfrey has become one of the UK’s most celebrated cases of a close encounter with a UFO. On patrol in the early hours of 29 November 1980, he saw a huge glowing mass straddling the main road through Todmorden, West Yorkshire. His patrol car’s VHF radio and his personal UHF ‘batphone’ both failed. He made a sketch of what he saw, then blanked out. When he regained consciousness, he was some 100 yards further up the road, and there was no sign of the UFO – but a search soon after revealed what seemed to be traces of its landing. When Godfrey heard that three other officers had seen a strange light apparently landing in Todmorden that night, he decided to make an official report. That found its way into the papers, caught the attention of ufologists, and led to a series of hypnotic regressions in which Godfrey recounted being aboard a UFO with some very strange ‘aliens’ indeed. In this analysis of the case I propose that PC Godfrey’s experience makes most sense in light of his personal history, while revealing much about the nature of abduction claims in general.
Peter Brookesmith was the scheming mastermind behind the best-selling partwork The Unexplained (Orbis 1980-3), from which he graduated with an advanced degree in scepticism and an indelible interest in anomalous experiences and the folklore they inspire. Among other things he has been an advertising copywriter, feckless graduate student, editor of school science texts for the Nuffield Foundation, semi-pro bass player, and assistant baker. His first honest job was in a brewery. He has written a number of books: on ufology, plagues, bugs and bacteria, handguns, and horses. He lives in Wales with a rifle, a pick-up truck, and an imaginary cat.