Invited Speaker Series 2010-11
Abstracts and biographies
Autum term 2010
Date: 12/10/10
Speaker: Jon Ronson
Title: The Men Who Stare at Goats and Other True Tales of Craziness at the Heart of Power
Abstract
A funny and strange illustrated talk in which Jon Ronson tells the true story behind the Men Who Stare At Goats movie (he wrote the book) and the Bohemian Grove (a secret club he once infiltrated where powerful business people and politicians take part in a ritual that culminates in a mock human sacrifice). He will read from his forthcoming book, The Psychopath Test, which looks once again at madness at the heart of power.
Biography
Jon Ronson is a writer and documentary film maker. His books, Them: Adventures With Extremists and The Men Who Stare At Goats were international bestsellers. The Men Who Stare At Goats has been turned into a major motion picture starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. He’s also the author of two collections, Out Of The Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness and What I Do: More True Tales of Everyday Craziness.
He’s written the popular Human Zoo and Out of the Ordinary columns for The Guardian, where he still contributes features. He currently writes and presents the twice Sony nominated BBC Radio 4 series, Jon Ronson On...
For Channel 4, Jon has made a number of films including the acclaimed five part series The Secret Rulers of the World and the multi award-winning Tottenham Ayatollah. His most recent documentaries are Reverend Death (Channel 4), Citizen Kubrick (More4) and Robbie Williams and Jon Ronson Journey to the Other Side (Radio 4).
In the US, he is a contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life.
His new book, The Psychopath Test, will be published in 2011.
Date: 26/10/10
Speaker: Deborah Hyde
Title: Demons and Nightmares: Why do People Believe in the Malign Supernatural?
Abstract
Deborah’s talk is on the cultural and physiological aspects of the religious and superstitious experience and she’ll answer such questions as:
When do the dead chew in their graves?
Why do vampires strike in autumn?
Why do ghosts live in electric clocks?
Biography
Deborah Hyde has been writing about the folklore of the macabre for eighteen years. She blogs on the themes of magic and supernatural belief as ‘Jourdemayne’, regularly syndicating the ‘The Lay Scientist’ and ‘The Pod Delusion’. She is writing a book called Unnatural Predators which will get published one day when she gets a minute or two to finish it.
She is Deputy Convenor of Westminster Skeptics and will be Managing Editor of The Skeptic Magazine (UK) in the New Year.
Her daytime, grown-up job is a makeup effects coordinator in the film industry – more vampires and zombies, then.
Date: 9/11/10
Speaker: Dr Gustav Kuhn
Title: The Science of Magic: How Magic Changes our Expectations About Autism
Abstract
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.
Biography
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 people’s 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: 16/11/10
Speaker: Dr Simon Dein
Title: A Messiah from the Dead: What Really Happens When Prophecy Fails
Abstract
What really happens when a prophecy fails? In this talk I examine the response to disconfirmation of prophecy among the ultra Orthodox Lubavitch Hasidim. In 1994 the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, died leaving no successor. For many years his followers had maintained that he was Moshiach – the Jewish Messiah – and would usher in the Redemption. After his death Lubavitch divided into two opposing groups. While some messianists hold that the Rebbe died but is to be resurrected as the messiah, others hold that he is still alive, but concealed. The anti-messianists maintain that the Rebbe could have been Moshiach if God had willed it, but they disagree vehemently that as such he could come back from the dead.
I will present a social-psychological account of Lubavitcher messianism using ethnographic data obtained through twenty years of fieldwork in the UK and in the USA. I move beyond the typical emphasis on cognitive dissonance (Festinger) to examine the role of rhetoric, religious experience and ritual in maintaining counterintuitive convictions.
Biography
Simon Dein is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Medicine at University College London, UK. He is an honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in Essex. He is author of Religion and Healing Among the Lubavitch Community in Stamford Hill, North London and has spent over twenty years conducting fieldwork among Lubavitch Hasidim, both in London and New York. He has published widely on the sociology of religion and religion and health.
Date: 23/11/10
Speaker: Dr Daniella Rudloff
Title: Mental ‘Short-Cuts’ – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Abstract
Can we trust our eyes? Why does a footballer’s performance usually drop right after they’ve been sold to a high-paying football club? What exactly is “anchoring”, and why are we doing it on dry land?
Daniela Rudloff will answer these and other questions by giving an introduction to the everyday mental shortcuts and biases we often employ, arguing that even though they might be misleading, they are also necessary – and almost impossible to avoid.
Biography
Daniela has always had a profound interest in critical thinking, leading her to join the German Skeptics in 1994. In 2006 she commenced a PhD in Psychology to find out what keeps Joe Bloggs from being a rational, reasonable and sceptical person.
Date: 7/12/10
Speaker: Andy Lewis
Title: The Persistence of Delusion: Why do Some Alternative Medicines Thrive and Others Die?
Abstract
The late eighteenth century was a very creative time for inventing new forms of quackery and some people became wealthy on the back of their creations. Of these creations, it is perhaps only homeopathy that has survived virtually unchanged into the 21st century. The majority of alternative medicines available today have been invented and developed within living memory, despite claims of their origins in antiquity.
What makes an alternative medicine successful? Why should homeopathy survive when the very popular Tractors of Perkins have long since been forgotten? Could you have predicted this in 1800? Today, we have a new industry of quack devices protecting us from mobile phones. Should you invest in such enterprises?
In this talk, Andy will look at the factors that allow patent medicines to thrive, and why consumers and practitioners latch onto them. Importantly, we shall explore the implications of these views for regulation and protecting the public from delusional or fraudulent claims.
Biography
Andy Lewis developed the Quackometer website that explores the pseudoscientific claims of alternative medicine websites and their impact on society.
Date: 18/01/11
Speaker: Dr Nathalia Gjersoe
Title: Totems, Temples and Teddies: The Cognitive Science of Why we Revere Special Objects
Abstract
Revered objects such as relics, talismans and idols are prevalent in almost all religions and cults across the world. Even within secular society we place faith in lucky pairs of socks, invest emotion in wedding rings and sentimental objects from our childhood, and place great value on original works of art. What all these objects have in common is that the idea of replacing them with identical copies is intuitively abhorrent. Clearly we are going beyond the aesthetic and functional worth of these artifacts and imbuing them with some sort of invisible “essence” that makes them unique. Our lab has used a variety of psychological and neuroscientific techniques to explore how children’s intuitive understanding of the world may influence their perception and beliefs as adults. In today’s talk I will discuss the development of an appreciation for authentic objects from early childhood, I will examine the implications that marking an object as a unique individual has for the ways that we subsequently think about it, and I will describe current esearch into the underlying psychological mechanisms that enable us to think that essences can be transferred from objects to people, a process known as ‘magical contagion’.
Biography
Dr Nathalia Gjersoe (University of Bristol) a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol and spends her time between the Bristol Cognitive Development Center and the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Center. Her doctoral work investigated how children develop beliefs that override their visual experience. She is currently working with Professor Bruce Hood on a Leverhulme-funded grant exploring the role that children’s naive biological concepts have in the development of superstitious and supernatural beliefs in adults.
Date: 01/02/11
Speaker: Dr Paul Rogers
Title: Paranormal Belief and the Misperception of Coincidental Events
Abstract
Numerous studies have shown paranormal believers are prone to various cognitive deficits including a poorer understanding of probability, randomness and coincidence. The current talk discusses three recent studies which have explored paranormal believers’ tendency to misperceive coincidental events. Study 1 examines believer versus non-believer differences in the tendency to misperceive two co-occurring (‘conjunct’) events as being more likely than two singular (‘constituent’) events alone; the so-called ‘conjunction fallacy’. As expected, believers made more conjunction errors than non-believers for both paranormal and non-paranormal events. Study 2 extends this work by examining believer versus non-believer differences in conjunction biases given variation in the temporal relationship (co-occurring vs. disjointed) and level of surprise associated with the two constituent events. Surprisingly, believers’ tendency towards more conjunctive biases was unrelated to these factors. Finally, Study 3 examines the extent to which paranormal and non-paranormal causal attributions (to explain a predicted plane crash) are influenced by the implied context of the prediction and/or the vividness and size of the crash itself. All three factors impacted on believers’ attributions to some extent. Results of these three studies are discussed in relation to the ‘probability misunderstanding’ as well as the more general ‘cognitive deficits’ models of paranormal belief.
Biography
Dr Paul Rogers completed a BA (Hons) in Economics and Social Policy & Administration (University of Kent, 1985-88) and then decided to become a psychologist! He went on to complete an MSc in Experimental Psychology (University of Sussex, 1991-92), an MSc in Psychological Research Methods (University of Exeter, 1994-1996) and finally a PhD in the psychology of self-perceived intuitiveness (University of Hertfordshire, 1997-2001). He has worked at the University of Central Lancashire since 2002 first as a lecturer and since 2007, as a senior lecturer in psychology. His research interests include the psychology of belief in the paranormal, the Barnum effect, self-perceived intuitiveness, psychological factors underlying lottery play and child sexual abuse blame attributions.
Date: 15/02/11
Speaker: Prof David Colquhoun
Title: How Quackery Corrupts Real Science
Abstract
The A huge industry has grown up that has the aim of selling to a gullible public, medicines that don’t work. Their sales methods are very much like those of the pharmaceutical industry at its worst, but at least some of the latter’s products work. Their products include homeopathy, reflexology and “detox”. Some universities offer “BSc (hons)” degrees in this sort of quackery, though many have stopped when what is actually taught on the degrees has been revealed with the help of the Freedom of Information act. The fact that such degrees have been accredited and validated by the university shows the utter uselessness of these procedures as a guarantee of quality. That sort of doublethink endangers science as a whole.
Biography
David Colquhoun, PhD, FRS, is a noted British pharmacologist. He held the A.J. Clark Chair of Pharmacology at the University College of London (UCL) from 1985 to 2004, Honorary Director of the Wellcome Laboratory for Molecular Pharmacology, and is now an Honorary Fellow (2004) and research assistant at UCL.
Since 2001, Dr Colquhoun has run DC’s Improbable Science, a wildly popular blog and website (with 1,670,000 hits) and Twitter account (with over 1200 followers). These sites are dedicated to critical assessment of “Alternative Medicine” and other forms of pseudoscience and science fraud. Lately he has taken an interest in more general problems of inference in clinical trials, science policy, and science communication. He has been particularly critical of a number of United Kingdom universities that offer science degrees incorporating pseudoscientific courses such as homeopathy and acupuncture.
In December 2009, Dr Colquhoun won a freedom-of-information judgment, requiring the University of Central Lancashire to release details of their undergraduate course in homeopathy.
Dr Colquhoun is well known as author of Lectures in Biostatistics (Clarendon Press 1970; Oxford University Press, 1996). With statistician Alan G. Hawkes, he developed a stochastic theory explaining single-ion channel recording, and the methods of maximum likelihood inference of mechanisms from experimental records with exact allowance for missed events. This has resulted in a series of experimental and theoretical papers about single-ion channel mechanisms. Besides UCL, Dr Colquhoun has worked at Yale University in America and at the University of Southampton.
Earning his PhD in 1964 at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied the binding of immunoglobins to lung tissue, Dr Colquhoun became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985.
Date: 22/02/11
Speaker: Dr Melvyn Willin
Title: Music and the Paranormal
Abstract
This talk will discuss three areas taken from my first PhD and will contain audio excerpts where appropriate. They are the possibility of music as a possible agent in telepathy experiments exploring the idea that musical experience might be communicated by means of the presence of an anomalous method of information transference. The second study researched the music that was claimed to have been composed by dead composers through musical mediums. Finally I investigated music that was claimed to have been heard when no physical source was available. I tried to discover the possible sources for anomalous music and explored various options.
Biography
Melvyn was born in St Albans, Herts. and attended a local grammar school. He received his first degree in 1972 and was later awarded a master's degree and Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music. His first doctorate (Sheffield University) linked music with paranormal phenomena and a second doctorate (Bristol University) researched the place of music in historical and contemporary witchcraft.
An abiding interest has been the paranormal and the occult. Melvyn was a Council member of the Ghost Club and the Pagan Federation for many years and a member of the Parapsychology Association and Folklore Society. He is a Council member of the Society for Psychical Research and their Honorary Archive Liaison Officer.
He has led several investigations into alleged hauntings and poltergeist outbreaks. His first book Music, Witchcraft and the Paranormal was published in 2005 with subsequent books in 2007, 2008 and 2010. He has also contributed a chapter to an academic book on the film The Wicker Man and an encyclopedia devoted to witchcraft. He advised on a project for the Freiburg Institute in Germany collating and publishing acoustical paranormal phenomena and he is currently a Perrott-Warrick scholar researching near death experiences from a music perspective.
Date: 01/03/11
Speaker: Prof Erlendur Haraldsson
Title: Hallucinations, Grief Reactions and Alleged Glimpses of the Departed
Abstract
The great European Human Values Survey conducted in most West-European countries showed that 25% of the population of Western Europe report an experience of contact with the dead (26% in UK). What is it that people experience and interpret as an encounter with someone who has died? How are the dead perceived, who are they, and under what circumstances do such experiences occur? The European Values Study does not answer such questions. In a large representative survey in Iceland 31% reported experiences of apparitions or encounters with the dead. We conducted over 400 in-depth interviews with persons who reported such experiences. They revealed interesting patterns and characteristics. Besides, the Icelandic experiences proved similar to findings in a major British study – the first of its kind – conducted over a century ago. Visionary experiences were most common, many “crisis apparitions” were reported, there was a much higher percentage of apparitions of persons who suffered a violent death than actually die that way in the population, and a fair number of collective experiences were reported. See homepage: http://www.hi.is/~erlendur.
Biography
Erlendur Haraldsson is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg in Germany and did further studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He has published over two hundred papers, mostly on anomalistic experiences, conducted national surveys, field studies and experiments related to such phenomena, and also on psychological testing and interrogative suggestibility. He is the author of five books, two of which have appeared in many languages (“At the hour of death” and “Miracles are my visiting cards”). For further details see his homepage: http://www.hi.is/~erlendur/
Date: 15/03/11
Speaker: Dr David Clarke
Title: The Angel of Mons and Other Wartime Legends
Abstract
The Angels of Mons were once described by the eminent historian A.J.P. Taylor as “the greatest wartime mystery of the 20th century.” Two weeks after the outbreak of the First World War a force of 30,000 crack British troops became trapped and surrounded in the Belgian town of Mons by a massive German Army three times as strong. But at the very moment they expected to be annihilated the German attack was suddenly halted, allowing the British force to escape to fight another day.
On the Home Front the escape of the British Expeditionary Force was proclaimed as “a miracle” by patriotic newspapers whose readers believed the Germans had been stopped not by armed force but by supernatural forces – angels and phantom bowmen led by the English patron saint, St George. During the remainder of the war soldiers and nurses came forward to claim they had personally witnessed the miracle at Mons. The legend captured the imagination of thousands across the world, brought hope to those who had lost loved ones on the Western Front and was resurrected again to inspire a new generation following the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940.
But was the story fact or fiction? For his 2004 book The Angels of Mons, David set out to discover the truth using contemporary documents from the Great War along with original accounts left by soldiers and the Red Cross nurses. For this talk he will answer this question: did the legend have any basis in reality, or was it, as Radio 4 claim, “the first urban myth”?
Biography
Dr David Clarke is course leader and senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University. Prior to teaching journalism skills he worked as a news reporter for The Sheffield Star and Yorkshire Post and spent four years working as a press officer in local government. His Ph.D in Folklore was completed at the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition, University of Sheffield, in 1999. Since 2008 David has been working with The National Archives (TNA) as their consultant for the ongoing release of the UFO files created by Britain’s Ministry of Defence. His book, The UFO Files, was published by TNA in September 2009.