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A GenePoool.com Essay
Talking to Ourselves
It appears a lot of people have been talking to the dead lately. It's difficult to determine with any degree of certainty whether what we're seeing now in the popular press, the talk shows, and the movies is a reflection of a renewed cultural interest in life after death, or whether our interest is spurred by the media itself. Nonetheless, it's everywhere.
And it's understandable. The close of the millennium brings with it a societal anxiety that is perhaps bolstered by the sacred claims of the Second Coming or the secular concerns over the Y2K bug. Anxiety begets a need for reassurance, and there is no better reassurance than the soothing notion that we live on after death. So we find ourselves in the thrall of the local fortune-teller, who tells us our future and delivers messages from our dead grandmother. We turn on the television and watch psychics speak to the dead in front of a live studio audience. Our desire to believe over-rides our own skepticism. It MUST be true.
What I find most interesting about all of it is that what we're seeing isn't really something new. The techniques of the T.V. psychic, your local medium, and a host of others have been in use for a very long time. We've been talking to heaven for ages, only it isn't heaven that's been answering.
A Brief History
The roots of modern mediumship began, oddly enough, in the toes of children. In 1848, Katherine and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, NY, began reporting strange rapping noises in their home, which became loud enough to keep their entire family awake. Evidently, the noises only presented themselves when Katherine or Margaret were in the room. Soon enough, the sisters were touring the United States, marveling all with their evident ability to speak to spirits who could manifest themselves only enough to make an odd knocking sound. It wasn't until forty years later that the sisters confessed: they were cracking their toe joints (they both had oddly jointed toes) to create the sounds.
By then, of course, the Spiritualist movement was already underway, and nobody who believed in this sort of thing was all that interested in hearing the Fox sisters confess to fraud.
A fairly large number of spiritual "stars" emerged in the wake of what the Fox sisters had begun.
There was the Davenport brothers, who supposedly induced the spirits to play musical instruments from within the same cabinet in which they were securely bound and gagged. The Davenports never actually went on record claiming they were genuinely communing with spirits, nor did they ever claim to adhere to Spiritualism. They even showed the pre-eminent conjuror of their era-- Houdini-- some of their tricks. Nonetheless, the Davenports were considered genuine, and they made a great deal of money by not denying that assumption.
There was D.D. Home, who would hold seances in which he floated to the ceiling, and in one case out one window and into another one. Home is still considered by many to be genuine on the grounds that he'd never been caught. However, all of his tricks were performed in near-total darkness. Consider how easy it must have been for him to float out a window; all he needed to do was open the window, tiptoe to another window and pretend he'd just come in. Home's supernatural skill seems, on reflection, to have been based mainly on the power of suggestion.
Or Margery Crandon, a Boston seer who produced "ectoplasm" from various orifices that subsequently turned out to be cheesecloth coated with a luminous paint. (This was a very popular technique in seances.) She was handily debunked by Harry Houdini, after claiming a fingerprint in wax was made by her spirit guide until it turned out to have been made by her dentist, who was currently not dead.
The list of spiritual stars is endless. All of them were thought to be capable of talking with the dead. And some very famous, erstwhile intelligent people believed them.
The most famous supporter of early spiritualism was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, despite a self-evidently brilliant intellect, seemed to go out of his way to prove himself the most gullible man on the planet. He apparently believed everything he was told regardless of how clearly ridiculous it was. He even believed two little girls in Bradford, England, had taken photos of themselves with live fairies, even when the book from which the fairies were clearly copied was provided for him, and even when it was pointed out that a flying fairy's wings should not have been clearly visible when captured by a camera with such a low shutter speed. Conan Doyle believed his good friend (for a time) Houdini was blessed with magical powers despite Houdini's own admission that he performed tricks and nothing else. In an effort to convince Houdini of the validity of spiritualism, Conan Doyle and his wife performed a seance for Houdini in which Houdini's deceased "mother" drew-- through Mrs. Conan Doyle-- a cross on a piece of paper. Houdini had a good deal of trouble accepting that he was speaking with his mother, considering he was Jewish. (You have by now noted Houdini's eminence in the early history of Spiritualism. He spent much of his free time challenging the claims of the Spiritualists and, being so well-versed in sleight of hand, was probably the most qualified person to do so.)
Conan Doyle probably advanced the spiritualist movement more than any other person, despite the continuous efforts of Houdini to disprove every self-evident charlatan he could. Spiritualism was-- and still is, albeit in a different form-- a thriving industry.
Only two things were necessary for a classical seance: darkness, and gullible (preferably wealthy) sitters. In a single evening, a sitter might see trumpets float in mid-air while playing music. Spirits may appear and disappear before their very eyes. Objects they had not seen in some time might suddenly drop out of thin air onto the table before them. The medium may spout information that they could not have possibly known, or speak to long-dead relatives that the sitter never recalled mentioning. Naturally, all of this happened in near-total darkness, where the only light available was the light that caught the luminous trumpet or the glowing spirit.
If the lights were turned on, the sitter would see the medium's assistant (or the medium herself) holding aloft the glowing trumpet with a non-reflective pole. The sitter might also see someone dressed all in black slowly raising a luminous cheesecloth or chiffon over his head, giving the appearance (in the dark) that a spirit has risen from the floorboards. It might never occur to the sitter that they'd invited the medium into their home several times, giving the medium ample opportunity to pilfer a "lost" object. If the medium is skilled in pickpocketing, she might have even snuck something out of the sitter's wallet earlier in the evening. The sitter probably doesn't know that the medium keeps a file of obituaries, and is in regular contact with other mediums in the area through private publications and databanks. And the sitter is undoubtedly unaware that he or she has already provided the information now being spouted back at them by the medium through a process called "cold reading."
As Lamar Keene, a former star medium, wrote "...hundreds of people who waited upon my spirits for advice in marital, legal, medical, and other problems of their lives built their existence here and the hope of a future one hereafter on a mere magician's bag of tricks!"
Much of what Lamar Keene and others of his kind got away with (and I've barely scratched the surface) in our not-so-distant past would never have worked today. Perhaps we've just become sophisticated enough to realize that there's no good reason why apparitions can only come out when the room is exceptionally dark. Or maybe mediums realized they didn't really have to go through all the trouble when a good cold reading will do the job just fine.
Cold Reading
It was about a year ago that I found myself without a costume at a halloween party. It wasn't really a big deal-- I'm not much of a costume person-- but to cover myself, if someone asked I told them I was a psychic. (I was wearing all black already, which seemed appropriate.) This turned out to be a decent conversation-starter, so I ran with it for a while. I even considered giving out readings, but balked when I realized it would be much more difficult to do any readings in a setting where people aren't dressed like they normally do, and who don't actually believe I have genuine powers.
About halfway through the night I ended up in a very long discussion with a man about my age who was, I thought (and I'm sure he'd agree) a very intelligent man with no predilection toward the mystical. He described the time he went to a medium, right before he proposed to his wife. He was worried about whether he was making the right decision. He had not told ANYone that he was planning to propose. To his amazement, in less than twenty minutes the psychic had determined the cause of his distress, assuaged his fears, and told him to go right ahead and propose.
Then he asked me to explain it.
Let's reconstruct the scene from the perspective of the medium.
Before our customer even enters the room, we know something about him, namely, that he is concerned enough about something to make an appointment in the first place.
He enters. He is clean-shaven, handsome, and neatly dressed. He has enough income to spare to spend it on a lark (i.e., throwing it to a fortune-teller.) We probably know if he drove here and, if he did, in what sort of vehicle. So we're pretty sure he has a job, and we have a fair idea what end of the social strata he resides in. We know he is fairly conservative, as we see no earrings, and no chains or jewelry. We also see no wedding ring, and no tan line on his ring finger. He looks healthy, and he is not overweight. We shake his hand. He has a firm handshake, with smooth, non-calloused skin and clean nails.
This is remarkable amount of information. We have standing before us a single white male in his mid-twenties with a white-collar job, in good health, who is nonetheless worried about something. Perhaps we chat with him informally for a few minutes just to get an idea of his language skills and perhaps gain a greater understanding of his educational background, but this isn't entirely necessary, because we already know enough to begin.
The first step is to ask, simply, what would a healthy, single, middle class white male be worried about? It could be something very obscure, but as of right now this is a game of probabilities. And the probabilities are few.
How many reasons could a man like this have for coming to see a psychic? Well, if you're a dentist you can be reasonably sure your patients come to you because of their teeth. No psychic skill is really necessary to glean this information. So why do people come to see mediums? On the most basic level they seek reassurance, but reassurance of a supernatural kind. They want to know if their dead friend or relative is happy, or they want to know about their future. (Or, in a perfect marriage of sorts, they want their happy dead relative to tell them what's going to happen to them.) These two concepts can be stated even more simply: he wants to move on with his life but can't, whether because he wants to speak to the dead last time or because he's worried about what might happen to him in the future.
If he's concerned about his future, we're left with few options. His concerns probably aren't financial, because it looks as if he's well employed. He also probably isn't worried about his health because he seems very healthy, and given his age it's not very likely he has a serious health problem. (Not impossible, of course; we're still dealing in likelihood here.) His parents, however, are probably in their late forties to late fifties, possibly even older. It IS possible he's worried about the health of one of them. He's also unmarried, and given his age and social strata, it's possible his concern has to do with something of a romantic nature.
If he wishes to speak with a dead friend or relative, our job is going to be considerably easier, for one simple reason: when he does speak (and keep in mind, in this hypothetical scenario, he has yet to open his mouth) he's probably going to tell us. This will make more sense in a moment.
The game from here on out is very easy to play. Our list is down to parental health, romance, or speaking on behalf of the dead. What we want to do is get him to give us the answer without coming out and asking him. This is where the process of cold reading begins in earnest.
The first step is to gain his confidence in our abilities, and the easiest way is to give him information we already know.
"I sense that you have a great concern," we might say. We can go on at length about this concern and how deeply it's affecting him, and how much he wants to know the answer to it. We can also rule out what we've already decided has nothing to do his problem, something like "it's not money, no it's more important to you than money." This really has little to do with finding out what we want to know beyond getting him to trust us and to respond positively to our probings.
We get to the real meat when we use our first "try-on." A try-on is an innocuous phrase that begins with "I feel that..." or "I want to say that..." The phrasing is intentionally vague. Say we guess wrong and think his mother has a health problem. We try "I feel that this has something to do with your mother..." We are dead wrong in our guess, but then again, he doesn't know we're aiming for a health concern, or even that we're guessing. The key to the try-on isn't in what WE say; it's how he responds.
If we've done our job adequately well, he can fill in the blanks for us with something like "yes, she's talked about this a lot." If this had been a health issue his response would have been very different. ("Yes, she's not well," for example.) If he's still wary of our scrying abilities and just comes out with "no" that's okay too. Since we put the words "I feel" in front of what is otherwise a definitive phrase, we have enough wiggle room to get out of this very easily. "Well I do sense that she is very close to this," might do just fine. It doesn't for a moment suggest that we've missed, and better, we're right. She will be close to her own son's wedding. Best of all, this works even if his mother is deceased: "close to this" can be taken literally or spiritually.
We're almost there. We try another try-on, like "I feel great love, but much confusion..." This is an absurdly vague statement, but it works perfectly, because, like everything else we've said, it invites him to fill in details, and make our prediction fit his life.
And that's really the key to the entire thing. We want to make the customer give us what we need to know, and we do this by inviting him to add details on his own. We stress from the outset that in order for this to work he has to be a willing participant in the process. This puts the onus of failure not in our hands, but in his. Then we make statements that sound as if we know exactly what we're talking about. As soon as he provides us with specific information, we say something to the effect of "yes, I sensed that!" And the best part is, later on he'll have no idea that he was the one who gave out all the factual information.
Is it really this simple? Yeah, pretty much.
I'd love to say the man at the party was utterly convinced by my explanation, but I don't think that was the case. My saving grace might have been that he had a tape recording of the session, and I urged him to go home and listen very carefully to find out who really provided the details. And on the bright side, when they voted on the best costumes at the end of the night, I got one vote. (I think it was his wife that voted for me.)
No matter how guilty I may be of post hoc rationalization (an argument with merit, I admit,) there's no mistaking the power of a skillful cold reading. If we were to blindfold our hypothetical medium in the above example, we would have seen the same results, although perhaps with a wider range of guesswork involved. We've already covered ourselves for every possible failure with intentional vagueness and an implication of blame on the sitter for not being helpful. The very fact that they believe we are psychic ultimately provides the proof that we are.
Talking To Heaven?
You're sitting in the talk show audience when the psychic steps out on stage. He introduces himself to the host, and then announces grandly that someone from the Other Side has a message for a member of the studio audience. Your pulse quickens: this is what you came for.
The man paces the stage. He looks tortured, as if he's trying desperately to hear something spoken very very softly from very far away. The entire room falls silent. He looks confused.
"I'm getting a name," he whispers. Your heart rate quickens. "Does the name Betty mean anything to anyone in this room?"
You are stunned. That was your daughter's name!
No longer shy, despite being on national television and among a crowd of strangers you leap to your feet and start calling out: "yes! Betty!"
The psychic comes to you. He looks elated to have been able to make this connection, to have this opportunity to bring you closer to your loved one. He takes your hand.
"Betty is with us," he assures you. "She..." he looks as if he's struggling, "she has another name, doesn't she? Elizabeth? Is that right?"
"Yes!" you fairly shout. In your free hand you toy with the necklace around your neck, the one you always fiddle with when thinking of her, the one with the gold letter E.
"And she died so suddenly, didn't she?" he says. Betty's lukemia was diagnosed late, you remember, and it was scarcely more than a year before she succumbed to it. So sudden.
"It was the lukemia," you cry.
"I see that," he says. Of course he does. He's listening to Betty right now.
"Betty has a message for you," he says. "She wants you to know she's very happy, and not to worry about her. She's with you always."
At this point you can no longer control yourself. You're happy, perhaps for the first time since her death. You're also convinced, and, most likely, so is the rest of the audience.
Try this some time. Pick a common name and ask a half dozen people if that name means anything to them. Most of them can probably make a connection to the name with a reasonable degree of ease. Now say you try this with sixty people instead of six. Using a very conservative estimate, we'll say for thirty of them the common name you've chosen "means something" to them. How many of those people came up with a connection to a dead person? Two? Three? Even if only one did, that's really all you need. And if the answer is zero, there's no reason to give up. The name means something to someone. If, for example, "Betty" is not a dead child, she might instead be a cousin, or a friend, and perhaps that cousin or friend is "thinking of you" right now. Perhaps "Betty" is worried for you because of your grief over a recent death. Perhaps now you're going to give us the name of THAT person and we can proceed.
Did the hypothetical "Betty" who died of lukemia really die suddenly? It certainly seemed sudden in the eyes of her mother, but when does a child's death NOT seem sudden? But if our psychic has guessed wrong-- perhaps Betty was sickly her whole life, or perhaps Betty was not a child, but a mother or grandmother-- there's no reason to panic. "She wishes she COULD have died suddenly" will get him out of that jam rather handily.
There is almost no way to go wrong if our star psychic takes his time and tries on enough names. He could strike out a half-dozen times without causing a ripple of dissent in the crowd, for the very simple reason that the audience WANTS to believe him.
And if the common name trick doesn't work there's always the common pain approach. Our star psychic might come out on-stage and declare he's sensing "someone who was in great pain, here." He would then put his hand head, or on his chest. It really doesn't matter what part of his body he chooses. He could even move his hand around and cover every major internal organ until someone in the audience admits that they lost a father, or mother, or SOMEone to a heart attack, liver cancer, whatever. Just about every life-threatening illness can be covered in this manner, after all, and someone who wants to believe is going to fit the condition to the claim.
If you're watching this performance on television, you probably have every reason to be impressed. But a word of caution is in order. There are two things you don't know about the show you're watching. The first is, you don't have any idea what's been edited out. Frankly, watching a psychic strike out with try-on phrases and pains does not make for good television. What you are watching is the success, and only the success. Second, you don't know what has gone on off-camera. Skeptic Michael Shermer describes a time when he was invited to tape an episode of Unsolved Mysteries with James Van Praagh:
"I... noticed that during the film-changing breaks, Van Praagh would make small talk with people in the room. 'Who are you here for?' he asked one woman. She told him it was her mother. Several readings later, Van Praagh turned to the woman and said, 'I see a woman standing behind you. Is that your mother?'"
This sort of advance information is what's known as a hot reading. It's what the psychics of yore had when they clipped obituaries and shared detailed information with one another. What Van Praagh knew, and Shermer learned, was that the will to believe will override everything, including the obvious fact that the psychic only knows because we just told him.
What Harm?
So what's so bad about providing comfort to the grief-stricken? It could be argued that a medium provides a valuable service, in the same way the psychiatrist or the priest does. But the psychiatrist's job is to help the patient come to terms with death on a personal level, and the priest, while reinforcing life after death, will not chat directly with the dead. The approach of the medium may be faster, but it's far more dishonest.
Some might even say it's fraud. James Randi, a conjuror whose made it his life's work to sniff out paranormal fraud, would certainly call it that. It's difficult to look at the steps involved in a successful cold reading and not think that the pratitioner isn't fully aware of what he or she is doing.
This is an easy trap to fall into. By allowing only two possibilities-- genuine or fraud-- we are left with this syllogism:
The psychic could be committing fraud.
But the psychic is a kind, honest person.
Therefore, the psychic is genuine.
What's left unexplored is the possibility-- I'd say probability-- that the psychic is just as fooled as the audience. I don't think this is true with every psychic (I have my doubts about Van Praagh, and let's not even bring up Uri Geller,) but I do believe the vast majority of mediums, seers and psychics think they have genuine powers. If you're a perceptive individual who already believes in psychic ability and you even suspect you might have that ability yourself, how long do you suppose it will take for you to develop basic cold-reading techniques on your own? The concept of using vague, open-ended questions to glean information isn't exactly difficult to discover; a good salesman uses the exact same skill, whether he knows it or not. And far better for you if you're taught by another medium; psychic powers tend to be "hereditary."
Reassurance of life after death is a valuable thing. It's what very nearly every one of us at one point in our lives desires to have. If looked at benignly, the plethora of mediums practicing today simply fulfill a need. Approached more sternly, they are preying on the weaknesses of the needy, and they are getting rich doing it. Either way, they aren't talking to heaven. They're talking to themselves.
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Bibliography
Hyman, Ray, 1977 "'Cold Reading': How to Convince Strangers That You Know All About Them" Reprinted in The Outer Edge: Classic Investigations of the Paranormal, Prometheus Books,1996, edited by Joe Nickell, Barry Karr and Tom Genoni.
Keene, M. Lamar, 1976 The Psychic Mafia, Prometheus Books, 1997 edition.
Randi, James, 1995 An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, St. Martin's Press.
Shermer, Michael, 1997 Why People Believe
Weird Things, W.H. Freeman and Company.
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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