In this week’s episode, we take a look at the mysterious and deceptive world of psychics.

Part 1: Rich Tackenberg is skeptical when a psychic tells him there’s something wrong with his car.

Rich Tackenberg is: a happily married gadget geek, a new homeowner, an SNL apologist, an Apple fanboy, a recent convert to tea, a dog owner, a recovering people-pleaser, a comedy nerd, an LA resident, a New York native, a snob about disposable pens, and (most importantly) a big fan of lists. 

Part 2: Science journalist Katherine J. Wu interviews neuroscientists Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik to get a better idea of how psychics, like the one from Rich Tackenberg’s story, operate.

Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik are award-winning neuroscientists and professors at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center. They are best known for their studies on perception, illusions, and attentional misdirection in stage magic. They produce the annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest, now in its 13th edition, and are the authors of the international bestseller Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions and Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I am not a scientist. I'm a storyteller. I grew up Catholic but my religion was science. I have always been a scientist at heart. I've never understood how people can believe in something unseen without any scientific data. When I was four years old I didn't understand that.

But as I've grown older, I've developed this new hypothesis, which is that people who do believe are happier than those of us who don't. It's interesting to notice how many people that believe seem to feel better.

I feel fine but I want to feel better, but I can't just choose to believe. I need some kind of data, which I've kind of been searching for for a while, which is why four years ago, when my wife said, “Hey, there's a psychic in West Hollywood that has seances in her living room and her guides speak to the attendees,” I was absolutely in. Because it sounds, I mean, I'm a science nerd. You can imagine what I think of psychics, but what if I'm wrong? What if there is some data that supports maybe there is something more than I can see? So, I'm absolutely in.

We show up at Pat's living room. All of the furniture has been removed from there and there's only shag rug carpeting and a row of seats. It's filled. There's about 12 of us.

Pat is a short, older woman and she raises her hands up so that her guides can start speaking to her. And she says to one of the first women in the circle, she says, “My guides are telling me that somebody in your life is going to disappoint you in the next 30 days.”

The woman's, “Oh, my God.”

And everyone has pads, by the way. They're writing this stuff down. And to the next guy, there was a guy, I don't know where he was sitting but he had been coughing. And she said, “One of my guides is telling me that you need to stop drinking orange juice because it is orange juice that is creating the phlegm.”

And he's, “Oh, my God. Thank God. Thank… okay, that's great. That's great.”

And this is going on and I'm so interested not in Pat but in the people, because they are absolutely, like this is like scientific facts that they are being given. They are writing this down as if it is absolutely true. And what's weird is as she's telling people things, some of them are very negative and yet they still seem to feel better, which is so interesting to me.

She comes around to me and she says, “You, there's a problem with your car.”

And I said, “Sure.”

And she says, “No. One of my guides is a racecar driver and he's telling me that you need to check your driver's side front wheel. It's actually above the wheel but there's a problem with your right driver’s side wheel.”

And I'm like, “Oh, I'm all in on this.”

And she's like, “No, no, no. Take this seriously. You could get in a lot of trouble, like absolutely…”

And I'm like I should be nervous but, in a way, I feel amazing. Like everyone else because I'm like this is like an actual data set. Like I can test a hypothesis as to whether this guide is actually telling the truth or not.

Now, I know the data set. My car was not there. I've never posted about my car. Nobody there knows me. There's very few variables for this experiment to run.

So I make an appointment at the Volkswagen dealership that got my car checked out. I do not tell them about the wheel because I may not know much about spirits but I know a lot about mechanics. And if I tell them that there might be a problem, I am going to spiritually manifest a $500 repair.

I get a call. I'm at work. I get a call and there's a problem with the car. I'm like, “Oh.” But it's actually something to do with the suspension. It's not the wheels, but it is going to cost me a couple of bucks and it's going to take longer, so I don't get to go to pick up the car until the very end of the day. It's about 5:00 and the dealership is closing. There's a lot of people. It's crowded. There's people on line in front of me, behind me, and there's one poor woman working the cashier, the whole service thing, and so by the time I get up, I do say to her, “So what was the problem with the car?”

And she says, “Oh, your sway bar was cracked.”

I said, “Okay, what's a sway bar?” I don't know what that is.

She says, “It helps your suspension. It connects to either side of the front of the car and it helps the car from like rocking and potentially flipping over.”

And I said, “Oh, okay. Where does the sway bar connect? I don't understand.”

She says, “Oh, it connects at either wheel.”

“It connects at the what,” I said. Well, just the crack, because one of the connections was cracked, she says. And if it had actually split, the sway bar would have fallen while I was driving and the whole car would have lost its suspension and I could have been in a lot of danger.

And I said, “Well, you're saying it connects to two wheels. Which wheel does it connect at?”

And she says, “Oh, I don't know. It doesn't matter. We have to replace the entire rod no matter what. So, debit or credit?”

And I am aware I am holding up the whole line but the number of variables in my little test here have gotten amazingly small. I need to know the answer to this last question.

So I said, “Look, I understand. It's actually important to me. Can you find out which side the sway bar was cracked on? Which wheel was it at?”

So she picks up the phone and she calls the mechanic. She's on the phone and I can tell she's trying to look nice but she's very annoyed. She hangs up and she says, “Look, I spoke to the mechanic. He says he doesn't know. He threw the sway bar out hours ago. There's really no way to know unless you wanted him to, like, pick through the garbage.”

And I'm like, “Well, am I the kind of person who's going to ask someone to dig through garbage because of this? Yes, I absolutely am.”

And I'm so nervous to say it. I lean in very closely and I say, “Look, I'm asking. This is kind of important because I was told there was a problem with my car by a psychic. And she said it was at one of the wheels and I need to know which wheel.”

And this woman looks at me and she says, “Sir, that is amazing. I am going to go back and talk to the mechanic.”

So she runs out of the room and I look back. There's all these people. They don't know what's going on but they are so mad at me. I'm so giddy and I'm so excited. Like this could be the thing and I'm already feeling good.

I'm starting to wonder if maybe my very hypothesis was flawed in the first place. That maybe I actually— you don't actually need to have proof to believe. Maybe you do just choose to believe in moments like this and that's how you feel better. So maybe the proof isn't actually that important, which was an interesting thing to be thinking about when she comes back in.

She looks very sort of disappointed but I haven’t told her what wheel. And she says, “We actually did find the sway bar. It wasn't hard to find. But I talked to the mechanic. I misspoke originally. The sway bar, it doesn't connect at the wheels. That's my apology. It doesn't. It actually connects above the wheels. Your sway bar was cracked above the right driver’s side wheel.”

And despite the crowd and the pressure, I lean in and I tell her about Pat and the racecar driver and the right driver’s side wheel. Then, right as they're closing, we are hugging.

Out of that, I can't say that I believe in God, but I do have this new scientific hypothesis that I've been pressure testing. I do kind of believe now that somewhere in the universe there is a dead racecar driver that is looking out either for me or for my car. I know the evidence so far it's pretty thin, but I do have a lot of data points that show conclusively that when I believe, I definitely feel better.

Thank you.

Part 2

Katherine: Susana and Steve, welcome back to Story Collider. We're so delighted to have you here with us and thanks for listening to Rich’s Story. Let's dive right in so we can start with what might be going on with people, like Rich, talk to psychics. How would you describe what psychics are doing? What are they advertising and what's actually happening when they do a reading?

Susanna: I would say that, fundamentally, it's a matter of false advertisement because the service that is supposedly been performed is not such what a psychic is providing is a sort of magic show, if you will, based on pretty much the same kinds of techniques and methods that magicians use. But they're not calling it a stage show. They're calling it something outside of what we know, science and physics and the natural world to be.

Steve: Overwhelmingly, what we found when we visited these types of events was that the psychics were preying on a subpopulation that really needed someone to tell them what they wanted to hear. So these are people who had real illnesses or real problems in their family or real issues that they felt despair and hopelessness for. And the psychic, if you want to call it a service or you want to call it a fraud, I guess both of these things might be considered true depending on your perspective, but they were preying on these issues and basically getting paid to tell people what they wanted to hear.

Susanna: Also, something that I think is important to keep in mind is that the kind of people or the moment in their lives in which people may go to a psychic, those tend to be vulnerable people in vulnerable situations in their lives. They're people who are often suffering and they're looking for solutions and spending their money, time, resources on a psychic that is going to provide not a solution but the illusion of one. It's just not the best expenditure of these resources.

Katherine: Right. Which brings us to the story that we're running on the podcast this week. Rich describes himself right at the top of the story as a skeptic. He's very data driven. He's not maybe the type of person that certainly I would automatically assume would go to a psychic. And he's not that person at the beginning of the story but he's still so tempted to believe that this psychic is telling him something genuine about his car. What is so appealing about what psychics have to offer people that even people like Rich are tempted to buy in at various points in their life?

Susanna: Well, it can happen to the best of us.

Steve: Yeah. There are a lot of avenues in Rich’s story that open up the possibility of cognitive fallacies and delusions. One of the things that I really liked about his story is it gave us some real openings to talk about those things with you and to really get down into how this could have happened.

Katherine: Yeah. Did any particular detail from the story jump out at you as, “Hah, that sounds familiar,” or maybe the psychic was picking up on X, Y or Z?

Susanna: Well, something that was interesting to me, there are many issues and there are many details that stood out for us. But something that I thought was interesting was that when the psychic is supposedly communicating with the spirit of this racecar driver, he doesn't use the technical word, which I believe is the sway bar, but instead refers to this thingy above the wheel, which seems a bit suspect coming from an expert.

And so it actually reminded me of the famous story of Harry Houdini when he also, at one point in his life even though he became a famous debunker of so called paranormal phenomena, he wanted to believe at one point that he wanted to establish communication with his dead mother. So, he went to visit a medium who was actually the wife of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and other stories.

So she said she could help him communicate with his mother and so she channeled the spirit of the mother who right away told Harry Houdini how happy she was to talk to him, how proud she was of him. And Harry Houdini immediately realized that that was not his mother, that the whole thing was a hoax because his mother would have never called him Harry. His real name was Eric. And she only ever spoke to him in German.

So how these ghosts and spirits communicate through the medium, it is telling if is the medium really speaking with words and the languages, in some cases, that they would use or it's some other persona behind them.

In the case of this racecar driver, it didn't sound like the person speaking was an expert on cars.

Katherine: Right. That's a really good point.

Steve: But I think it comes down to, even if that's all true, how could they possibly make this amazing prediction that turned out to be true. It's so unlikely for this to happen. And the fact is it's not that unlikely for this to happen.

So over a 30 year period, there have been about 1,115 recalls for every on 1,000 cars sold. You can see this is in iseecars.com that this is a known fact and it's presumably, I believe, known very well to that psychic who may well have been doing a technique called ‘hot reading’, which is to have hot information or information that is definitely known or very likely to be about a subject and then portray it as part of a prediction from a dead source.

And so if this was a hot reading, we don't know what kind of car the storyteller drove but, between the period of 2011 and 2017, for example, Ford Explorers had a recall on sway bars that affected 1.2 million vehicles.

So, imagine that the psychic, as part of their job as people arrive at their house in their cars, she looks out the window and she looks in her driveway and the road in front of her house and she looks at the different car models and she looks up those car models to see if there's anything with a recall. Okay? Which is very likely, not very unlikely.

So if she has a room of 12 people, I think he said, it's very likely that at least one of them has a recall. So she could now arm herself knowing that one of them had a recall. And then even if she got the side of the car wrong with the right side versus the left side of the sway bar, it's 50 50. But even if she got it wrong, it's still an amazing prediction even if it's the left side and not the right side.

So how this prediction could have happened is actually not difficult to imagine at all if you are armed with the knowledge that recalls are common and it would seem amazing to someone who you predict.

Susanna: The other technique that psychics use, of course, is ‘cold reading’ in which you can just make generalizations and be right a lot of the time because they apply to everybody. One example from the story is when the psychic said to one of the guests there is somebody in your life that's going to disappoint you in the next 30 days. That basically would apply to 100% of people. It would apply to me every day, I think, within the next 24 hours. It's happening right now.

Katherine: Absolutely. I was thinking that too. You say something like, “Oh, someone in your life must be mad at you,” or you look out the window and see kids toys or a car seat in the car and you say, “Oh, your kid might cause you some trouble in the next two months.” Of course those things are going to happen so that makes total sense.

But I guess to return to the customer side of the story, Rich started out as a skeptic and still he was he was tempted to buy in. I imagine there are some people who are more susceptible to this type of I guess marketing or magic tricking. How does that factor in?

Susanna: Well, I think another of the elements that we see in Richard's story is a fair amount of confirmation bias, if you will, which is one of the most common cognitive biases. And, yes, he states at the beginning of the story that he's a skeptic but he has a vested interest. He wants to believe and he states that I want to believe because I think that believing is going to make me happy.

And then, guess what? He ends up believing and feeling happier for it.

Katherine: And I think that brings us to the last thing I wanted to ask about, which is, undoubtedly, there are psychics and magicians and all sorts of people who have been able to exploit others because of their beliefs, because of their inherent biases. But in a lot of cases, is there potentially a positive to believing in psychics? Is there always necessarily a harm? Rich seems fairly happy at the end of the story so what's the big deal if he listens to a psychic every now and then?

Steve: Yeah. I don't think that there's a big positive here. I think that what happened to Rich, the way he told the story anyway was that he was pressed to get his car repaired or taken in. It could have been that his sway bar was broken. It could have been that it wasn't and he would have scheduled this car repair and ended up losing money in time based on something that wasn't real.

And so when this is happening in a different context of someone who is actually very concerned and desperate to learn something that they really need to know about their cancer, for example, and they're given, for example, a magic crystal that if they only put that under their pillow at night, this is going to get rid of their tumors, which is the kind of thing we've seen sold at psychic fairs.

Then this can be extremely damaging because they may believe and hope in this crystal that was very inexpensive and it's not going to take maybe a $100,000 for a surgery to remove and their belief system allows them to go home thinking that this is actually more likely to work than a surgery and less pain. And then they don't get the actual medical care that they need.

I haven't heard a case yet where I come away thinking, “Wow, I'm really glad that that confirmation bias or that memory illusion or that false causation really happened,” because, otherwise, the world would be worse.

Susanna: And, of course, there's a selection process, right? Like we select the memories and we select the stories that are good to share and that are good to remember. The stories in which maybe the psychic prediction didn't come through at all, they don't make it to the Story Collider. Or the cases in which the person went to a psychic and ended up feeling even more miserable than they started with, we don't tend to hear about those stories. They're just not as rewarding to hear about it as they don't give you the same sense of curiosity.

So it is easy to end up with a very biased picture of the “Services” that psychics provide.

Katherine: Right. I wonder in doing your research on psychics, has anyone ever asked you something along the lines of, “Well, makes sense to be a skeptic. Makes sense to be data driven.” But how do you stop yourself from being completely cynical about everything? Where is the line between not believing what's actually bunk and having no faith at all in other people?

Steve: That's interesting. Usually, people ask us how can they protect themselves and gird themselves against illusions so that they can have perfect perception. Usually, our advice to that is you don't want that. You don't want perfect perception. You want to— the Illusions help you, not the frauds in this case but the illusions that help you live your life that fill in the gaps and that allow you to see things that are correcting context even though your sensory systems can't quite perceive them with perfect alacrity. That kind of illusion is helpful.

I think that we don't want to or we've never been asked that people want to perceive those things because, otherwise, their lives will be worsened. At least I don't recall having had that happen.

Susanna: I think there are many ways in which we can make our lives happy and meaningful without deluding ourselves in the process or being exploited by others in the process. But we may not be ever completely objective. So the danger tends to go in the other direction because the way that our brains are wired is to be to see the glass half full, if you will. And there is a whole range of what are known as positive illusions in which we tend to interpret reality, including gambling odds and all sorts of life situations better than they objectively are.

This is generally a sign of good mental health, that we tend to be more optimistic than circumstances grant it, but I don't think that we need to go one step further or 10 steps further and try to seek ways to disconnect ourselves further from reality.

Katherine: Right. Yeah, I think we are so often told the slightly trite phrase that ‘seeing is believing’, but, in a lot of cases, it's a little bit more like believing is seeing.

All right. I think that is all we have time for. But Steve and Susanna, thank you both so much for joining us.

Susanna: Thank you so much. This was fun.

Steve: Thank you very much.