Rather than using a stockbroker in Boston, our target person was Katie Smith, a twenty-seven-year-old event planner working in Cheltenham. As with Milgram’s original study, all initial volunteers and subsequent recipients were asked to send the parcel only to those they knew on first-name terms. The original participants, and all their subsequent recipients, were also asked to return one of the postcards to us so that we could track the packages as they moved around the country.
There tended to be just four people linking our initial volunteers to Katie—two fewer than obtained in Milgram’s experiment. Some of the chains in our study provide striking illustrations of just how well-connected apparent strangers actually are. For example, one of our initial volunteers was a textile agent called Barry. Barry lives in Stockport and, perhaps not surprisingly, doesn’t know Katie Smith. Barry passed the package onto his friend Pat because she lived close to Cheltenham Racecourse. Pat also doesn’t know Katie. However, Pat sent the package to her friend David, who happened to be the head of the Cheltenham Science Festival. Bingo! David knew Katie and so was able to complete the chain and pass the package directly to her.
Our study was the first British replication of Milgram’s famous experiment. The decrease in the average number of links taken to reach our target person may be due to Britain’s being better connected than America. Or the results could be seen as supporting the intriguing possibility that the world has become substantially smaller over the last forty years. Perhaps, as a result of vast increases in electronic communication, telephone networks, and travel, we are all connected to one another as never before. Maybe, on a social level, science and technology have genuinely shrunk the world.
Possible evidence of global shrinkage is all well and good, but did we find evidence to suggest that lucky people are especially well connected, and therefore live in a smaller world than most? To find out, we asked the initial volunteers involved in the study to rate their general levels of luckiness prior to taking part. Thirty-eight volunteers did not send their parcels to anyone, therefore guaranteeing that their packages would never reach Katie. Interestingly, the vast majority of these people had previously rated themselves as unlucky. We wanted to discover what lay behind this curious behavior. These volunteers had gone to considerable lengths to ensure that they participated in the study, but they had effectively dropped out at the first stage. We wrote asking why they had failed to participate. Their replies were telling—the majority said that they couldn’t think of anyone they knew on first-name terms who could help deliver the parcel. As a result, from the outset it appears that the lucky participants knew far more potential recipients for the parcels than unlucky people and were far more successful when it came to forwarding them. These results provide substantial support for the notion that lucky people are living in a much smaller world than unlucky people and that this, in turn, helps maximize their potential for “lucky” small-world encounters in life.
WALKING ON HOT COALS AND THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Some people appear to be able to walk on fire, crossing unharmed across a long bed of burning coals with a surface temperature of approximately 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The scientific explanation for this amazing feat is that the thermal conductivity of coal is low and, providing the bed of embers is relatively short, little heat will be transferred to the walkers’ feet. However, many firewalkers earn a good living expounding a more extraordinary explanation. According to them, they use the power of the mind to create a magical “energetic” force field that protects them from harm, and they claim they can teach this skill to others. Whereas science would predict that people can walk across approximately fifteen feet of embers without being burned, the paranormalists boast that they can walk any distance safely.
In 2000, I worked with the BBC science show
Tomorrow’s World
to stage a dramatic test of this claim.
37
The program spent a large sum of money burning fifty tons of wood to create a sixty-foot-long bed of red-hot embers. Live on television, the alleged miracle mongers put their paranormal theory to the test: Each jumped off the bed at around the twenty-five-foot mark, and they all suffered second-degree burns on their feet. I interviewed the firewalkers afterward and discovered that they had a different explanation for their failure. One spoke about how the bright television lights had prevented him from going into the deep trance needed for a successful demonstration. Another explained that her guardian angel had unexpectedly left her a few moments before the start of the walk. It was a remarkable demonstration of how belief in the impossible can be bad for your health. Even second-degree burns hadn’t caused them to question their paranormal abilities.
Fortunately, most people do not think they possess superhuman abilities. Many, however, believe that they have experienced equally strange phenomena. About a third of people believe in ghosts, and around one in ten claims to have actually encountered one. I have no idea whether ghosts exist, but I am fairly sure that people are quite capable of fooling themselves into believing that this is the case. For many years my colleagues and I have carried out unusual experiments into the psychology of ghostly experiences.
38
Britain has more than its fair share of haunted homes, and much of the work has taken place at some of the best-known “haunted” locations in the country. We were the first researchers to be invited to investigate the alleged ghostly goings-on at an official Royal Palace, spending ten days at the splendid Hampton Court on the outskirts of London. In other work, we staged a study in a series of apparently haunted vaults deep under the historic streets of Edinburgh, Scotland.
People always seem to be a little disappointed to discover that our experiments are quite different from the sorts of studies portrayed in
Ghostbusters.
We tend not to wander around in jumpsuits with vacuum cleaners strapped to our backs, and, for the record, we have never caught a spirit form in a ghost trap. However, we don’t set out to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts. Instead, our work is all about trying to understand why people consistently report odd experiences in certain parts of these allegedly haunted locations.
Most of the studies have involved asking members of the public to walk carefully through the locations in a systematic way and to describe any strange and unusual phenomena that they experience. Then, by examining the types of people who report these experiences, and the places in which they tend to report them, one can slowly start to piece together the psychology of the haunting.
We have discovered that some people are far more sensitive to the presence of alleged ghosts than others. Many volunteers will wander through a “haunted” location and experience absolutely nothing; a few moments later, another person will walk through exactly the same spot, instantly feel uneasy, and report a weird sense of presence. Those who experience strange phenomena tend to have very good imaginations. They are the types of people who make excellent hypnotic subjects; often they cannot remember whether, for instance, they turned off the iron before leaving the house or simply imagined doing so. It seems that they are able to convince themselves that a spirit may really be standing right behind them or hiding in a dark alcove. As a result, they genuinely feel scared and cause their bodies and brains to produce the signals associated with fear, such as the hairs on the back of their neck standing up and a sudden sense of cold.
The work also suggests that context plays a vitally important role in the proceedings. This was brilliantly illustrated in an experiment published in 1997 by Jim Houran, a psychologist and a collaborator of mine.
39
Jim took over a disused movie theater that had no reputation for being haunted and had two groups of people walk around it and rate the number of unusual phenomena they experienced. Members of one group were told that the place was associated with lots of ghostly phenomena and so they were on the lookout for spirit activity. The others were told that the theater was currently undergoing renovation and that they were there to rate how each room made them feel. The two groups visited exactly the same locations in the theater, but they perceived them through completely different mind-sets: The “ghost-busters” reported significantly more unusual experiences than members of the other group.
So does that mean that all ghostly experiences are the result of an overactive imagination combined with the correct context? Not necessarily. Other work, carried out by the late Vic Tandy, suggested that some ghostly experiences might really have been the result of something strange in the air.
40
Vic, an electrical engineer by training, spent much of his time looking into phenomena that pricked his curiosity, including conjuring and ghosts. In 1998, he was working at a company that designed and manufactured life-support equipment for hospitals. The firm ran a small laboratory that Vic shared with a couple of other scientists. This laboratory also had a reputation for being haunted, and the cleaning staff sometimes reported feeling odd in the building. Vic had always put this down to suggestion, or perhaps the result of the small furry animals that inhabited parts of the building. That was until he himself had a strange experience. Working alone late at night, he started to feel increasingly uncomfortable and cold. Next, he had the distinct impression that he was being watched, and looked up to see an indistinct gray figure slowly emerge in the left side of his peripheral vision. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and, he later recalled, “It would not be unreasonable to suggest that I was terrified.” Vic eventually built up the courage to turn and look at the figure. As he did, it faded away and disappeared.
Being the good scientist that he was, Vic thought that maybe some of the bottles that held anesthetic agents might have leaked, causing him to hallucinate. A quick check revealed that this wasn’t so. Stumped and stunned, he went home.
The following day, he planned to enter a fencing competition and so brought his foil into the lab for last-minute repairs. As he clamped the foil into a vise, it started to vibrate frantically. Although some may have been tempted to attribute the movement to poltergeist activity, Vic again searched for a rational explanation. This time, he found one. By carefully sliding the vise along the floor, he was able to observe that the movement was at its maximum in the center of the laboratory and petered out toward each end of the room. Vic figured out that the room contained a low-frequency sound wave that fell below the human hearing threshold. Further investigation confirmed his suspicions. He traced the source of the wave back to a newly fitted fan in the air-conditioning system. When the fan was switched on, the fencing foil vibrated. When the fan was turned off, the foil remained stationary. But could Vic’s discovery explain the seemingly ghostly phenomena of the night before?
Vic knew that although these waves, usually referred to as “infrasound,” can’t be heard, they carry a relatively large amount of energy, and so are capable of producing weird effects. In the 1960s, NASA was eager to discover how the infrasound produced by rocket engines might affect astronauts during launching. Their tests showed that it did possess the potential to vibrate the chest, affect respiration, and produce gagging, headaches, and coughing. Additional research suggested that certain frequencies can also cause vibration of the eyeballs and therefore the distortion of vision. The waves can also move small objects and surfaces and even cause the strange flickering of a candle flame. Writing about his experiences in the pages of the
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research,
Vic speculated that some buildings contain infrasound (perhaps caused by strong winds blowing across an open window, or the rumble of nearby traffic), and that the strange effects of such low-frequency waves might cause some people to believe that the place is haunted.
The idea is plausible, because infrasound is deeply strange. It can be produced naturally from ocean waves, earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanoes. The 1883 Krakatoa eruption produced infrasound that circled the globe several times and was recorded on instruments worldwide. These low-frequency sound waves are also a by-product of nuclear explosions, thus explaining the network of infrasonic listening posts that constantly monitor the environment for possible evidence of nuclear bomb tests.
Several animals are sensitive to frequencies undetectable by the human ear, including ultrasound (high frequency) and infrasound (low frequency). Research into the detection and use of these extreme vibrations within the animal kingdom has a long history. In the early 1880s, the pioneering scientist Francis Galton placed an ultrasonic whistle in the end of his hollow walking stick and wandered around Regents Park Zoo noting down which animals responded to the high-frequency sounds produced whenever he pressed a rubber bulb at the top of the stick: “Some curiosity is inevitably aroused by the unusual uproar my perambulations provoke in the canine community,” Galton reported after using this forerunner of the modern-day dog whistle.
More recent, but conceptually similar, research has shown that whales, elephants, squid, guinea fowl, and rhinoceros are all sensitive to low-frequency sounds, using these signals to migrate and communicate over vast distances. This, combined with the fact that infrasound is a natural by-product of some earthquakes and tornadoes, led some researchers to suggest that they might also be able to detect the infrasound emitted from such natural disasters and use it as a kind of early-warning system. Some have suggested that this accounted for the alleged fleeing of animals before the 2004 tsunami in Asia.