SGU Episode 384

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SGU Episode 384
24th November 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 383                      SGU 385
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
RW: Richard Wiseman
Quote of the Week
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom but to set a limit to infinite error.
Bertolt Brecht
Links
Download Podcast
SGU Podcast archive
Forum Discussion

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Saturday October 27th 2012 and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey everybody.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey guys.

S: Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

S: And we have a special guest this week, Richard Wiseman, Richard welcome back to the Skeptics' Guide.

RW: Bonjour, ça va?

S: You are the host, the MC of SCI*Con two thousand and twelve.

RW: Yes.

B: Twenty twelve.

S: Twenty twelve, and you're doing and excellent job, we're enjoying it very much and thanks again for joining us on the show.

Special Report: Richard Wiseman on his Dream Research (0:44)

• Richard updates us on his dream research and the iPhone app - Dream:ON

This section is in the middle of being transcribed by rwh86 (talk) as of {{{date}}}. To help avoid duplication, please do not transcribe this section while this message is displayed.

S: So, we were chatting a while ago about your recent work that you've been doing, you're working on something to do with dreams.

RW: I am, I'm working on Dream:ON which is an iPhone app which everyone can download because it's free, and it's an idea that came to me I guess about a year and a half ago when I looked at some very bizarre research from I think it's the early '70s from Stanford I think it was, and it was a guy who was waiting until people were in dream states, he was a sleep researcher.

B: Mr. LaBerge? Stephen LaBerge?

RW: No.

B: No?

R: No, no no. It's William Dement.

S: And we should mention before we go on that you are a psychologist.

RW: We should mention that.

S: Yes.

RW: Yes. Shall we?

S: Yes.

J: (laughs)

RW: Let's mention that. I'm a psychologist.

S: And author of several books, we'd like to...

RW: Oooh the books, Paranormality. That's very good, they were very kind, they gave me a little prize for that at this very conference.

S: Is that right?

RW: It was very nice.

S: A very prestigious prize I understand.

RW: Very prestigious prize, the Robert Bales critical thinking.

S: Yeah, you're following in the footsteps of some very prestigious recipients.

RW: I understand the previous recipient is not very far from me now.

S: That's right.

(laughter)

RW: Did it change your life?

S: Oh tremendously, yes. It altered the trajectory of my life in numerous ways.

RW: But I tell you what's nice is the money that comes with it. Ten thousand dollars, lovely.

(laughter)

E: Dollars or Euros, or Lira? Yen?

RW: So yes, I'm a psychologist, and I got interested in dreaming because of Paranormality actually, there's a chapter on precognitive dreams, so I got into the work of a guy called William Dement and he did this great experiment, best experiment ever, so in a sleep research lab, he waited until people were in dream state, showing REM, Rapid Eye Movement, and then he played in audio sounds, as audio uh, sounds...

S: As opposed to non-audio sounds.

RW: As opposed to those audio-visual images... of things like a steam train for about 20 seconds, and then he woke people up and they were dreaming about, they'd incorporated the sound into their dream.

S: Yeah.

RW: And about 50% of people he got this effect on. So I read about that and I thought, "wouldn't it be great if we could take that and roll it out on the iPhone and influence the whole world's dreams?" So I went to an iPhone company and they said, "that's insanely difficult" but they were prepared to try it, and we worked for a year and basically you take your iPhone at night, before you go to bed, you decide what time you want to wake up and then you put it on your matress next to you and it monitors movement in the half an hour, 30 minutes, before you wake up, it monitors movement very very closely and when it feels that you are very maximally still, i.e. dreaming because you're paralized in your dream, it plays in the sound scape of your choice, could be walking on a beach, could be out in nature, could be on an aeroplane, and that influences your dream, it wakes you up in a nice gentle way and then you're asked to report your dream into our dream bank, called the dream catcher.

S: The dream catcher.

J: Oh, that's very clever.

E: Yeah.

RW: It's good hey?

J: Yeah, that's good.

RW: So we rolled that out and currently, I just checked last week, we currently have 10 million dream reports.

J: Oh my god, wow.

RW: Isn't that scary? And the main finding is that when people wake up in the mornings, they can't spell.

(laughter)

RW: But it's lovely, and it doesn't work with everyone by any means, we're still changing the algorithms on it, because we can do that remotely, it's very scary what you can do on iPhones, over time you log on your iPhone, we send you a different algorithm but you don't know it and we get the data back and so on. And for some people it works very very well so we have people who are almost adicted to it, there's one woman whose dreams I read actually, almost every morning because she's having a long-term affair with George Clooney in her dreams.

S: Mmhmm. In her dreams.

RW: And she met him in Walmart, not for real, in her dream, about a month ago and now she dreams about him every night using the dreamscapes.

J: So really, this whole app was launced because you're just a really creepy voyeur.

RW: Pretty much, or that's also true, but it's incidental.

(laughter)

RW: But! But, but, but. So we've got a new dreamscape coming out this very week, I've completely lost track of time so I think it's coming out either the next couple of days or the couple of days after that, because we ask people what dream would you most like to have? And we ask guys and the answer was, we want to be part of a zombie attack.

B: Really? Wow, awesome!

S: Really?

E: Surprising.

J: Which side of the fence though?

RW: Oh, as a human.

J: OK.

B: Living human.

RW: Yep. So we have a well known news reader who is reading out this sort of news and suddenly there's a zombie attack and he takes you how to kill zombies, so that's the latest dreamscape. And then we're going to premium dreamscapes later on in the year which basically are sexually oriented. So you can have intercourse, as I refer to it as a psychologist...

(laughter)

RW: With celebrities. Yep.

J: How, how is your app going to make people dream those things?

RW: Voiceover artists.

J: So it's going to be basically like, "hey, this is J.Lo, we're gettin' it on."

S&E: (laughs)

RW: Yep. I'm doing the Elvis one.

J: Awesome.

(laughter)

S: Are you doing all dead celebrities, so you can avoid the...

RW: Precisely.

S: Aaah.

RW: Very good. Here we go: Uh huh huh.

(laughter)

E: Wow.

B: Nailed it.

E: I'll tell you.

S: I'm getting a little hard.

E: I'm in Nashville.

(laughter)

J: So that's the first thing that Elvis says. And then five minutes later he goes, "oh, oh."

RW: (laughs) No he only goes, "Uh huh huh" because that's all I can do.

J: Oh, OK (laughs)

RW: So that's the full extent of it. So it is a rather limited sexual dream. So yeah, so that's what I'm doing at the minute. I love it. I love messing around with all of these things.

J: That's cool.

B: Richard, that reminds me, I remember reading research, I think it was Stephen LaBerge, who was studying lucid dreaming and how to induce lucid dreams, he came up with the dream light which created these visual images having to do with sight, as opposed to the ones that don't.

(laughter)

B: So basically it determines when you're in REM sleep, it produces a light and if you're going to sleep you know that if you see a blue light then that means you're dreaming, so you will actually see the blue light in the dream, then you know this is a dream and then hopefully become lucid and then get some sort of control.

S: Well you could probably easily add a lucid track to say, "you are dreaming".

RW: Correct, we do have those.

B: Awesome.

RW: But lucid dreaming is so hard to do, but if you use the tracks a lot then the gentle voice whispers, "you're now dreaming" and you take control of it.

B: Oh, I'm going to try that.

RW: Um, we had a bit to do with Stephen, who is a big lucid dreamer, trying to develop these things, and I didn't know this about lucid dreams, it's so real to them that they have to do things to see whether or not they're lucid...

B: Yes. Reality testing, yeah.

RW: Reality testing. One of the things is looking into a mirror.

B: Really?

RW: Because if you look into a mirror you won't see your own reflection in a lucid dream, I think because the cognitive architecture to produce an image is too much for the brain, so that seems to be their number 1 test, you look into a mirror.

B: I'm familiar with two other ones.

S: To clarify, when they're awake?

RW: Yep.

S: They do these things to make sure they're not lucid dreaming?

RW: No, when they're dreaming, because they can't tell the difference. So yes, that's right. So when they're awake they'd do it, because they think, "oh I might be dreaming" and then see their reflection and think, "no this is reality I'd better not jump out of the building".

S: That's odd.

B: No it's not.

J: No it's not.

S: I mean I could see not knowing, if you're dreaming not knowing if you're dreaming or not, but when you're awake, really? They can't tell if they're awake?

J: No Steve, you're training yourself because if you do it enough, it becomes a habit and then you'll do it in your dream.

B: Right, that's the whole idea.

J: You're conditioning yourself.

S: No I get that. That's what I was trying to clarify. They're not looking in the mirror when they're awake to make sure that they're really awake.

RW: Well they would be because otherwise if they knew that they were dreaming, there'd be no point in looking in the mirror.

S: Yeah, so they're talking about something different from what you're talking about.

RW: OK.

S: They're talking about training yourself to do something when you're awake so that you'll do it in your dream and that will enable you to achieve a lucid state.

RW: No.

S: You're talking about, when they're awake, they're like "hey, am I really awake, or is this a lucid dream?"

RW: Correct.

S: And they'll look in the mirror to check themselves.

RW: That's correct.

J: OK.

S: Now that seems amazing to me.

B: What I've learned with lucid dreaming is that you get in the habit of asking yourself, "am I awake or am I dreaming right now? How do I know I'm not?". And the two ways that I read about, one is to read, open a book, read anything and invariably in a dream if you read something and look away and look back, the words will have changed and be jumbled up and I've done it many times and for me it works every time, the words always change. The other way to test it is to test physics really, you jump up in the air and you try to extend your fall and if you extend it even a fraction of a second, you know you're dreaming or in some kind of microgravity.

J: There's the rub though, because your detection of reality is compromised is dreaming, right? That's the whole thing.

B: But you're not going to read words and then look away and then read back and then you're going to see the same words, they will change.

J: No I agree with you, but what I'm saying is that when you're dreaming, for the most part all these crazy things are happening, and it's not occurring to you that you're dreaming because your brain is not fully functioning.

B: Right, you need a certain level of lucidity just to think about doing that, and people who have good dream recall in general can kind of get into that state more often than people that can't do it because they never really reach a level of lucidity where they can question reality.

RW: That's right, I mean what was quite funny with the Dream:ON app is, because I was actually the main pilot for it, and it's a very difficult thing, the algorithms, the movement, the volume, so the thing is that as you start to move, it lowers the volume in the dreamscape and so on. Anyway, so I'm testing all of this stuff, and so I'm sleeping with Caroline, my partner, who is a very light sleeper, and so I put this iPhone down one night and say, "oh, we're doing a test tonight" and she'd go, "oh, fine" and stuff, and then about you know, 3 am it would zip on with, "you are currently asleep!"

E: Oh gosh.

(laughter)

RW: "You are currently asleep and you can control..." and she was furious! And so I used to wake up with the iPhone in very interesting places. But um...

(laughter)

RW: But I'm quite a heavy sleeper, so I slept through the whole thing.

B: There's an app for that.

RW: Yes. So she had a very tough time with it, but we think we've got it right now, it's not bad.

J: OK, so what's your ultimate goal here?

RW: Well I'll tell you what it is. One is there's loads of research showing the mood that you're in for the day is often set by your final dream, so you have a rough dream and then you're in a bad mood. So trying to change that. The other thing is I really got in to the literature on depression and dreaming, I didn't realise that there's such a strong tie-up. So depressives dream about five times as much as normal people as it were, non-depressives. And then in their dreams they're doing the same as they do in real life, which is ruminating, they're going over their problems time and again. So the idea of kind of going in and giving them a more positive dream experience is sort of an interesting one, it's quite curious.

J: Yeah.

S: Mmhmm. Are you controlling for medication with that? I know medications for depression can give you very vivid dreams.

RW: I don't know the litereature well enough to answer that question.

B: Do they dream five times as much or do they have five times better recall?

RW: Well this would be coming from sleep labs, so I would think that it would be about five times as much time in the classic...

S: in the REM...

RW: ... in the REM state.

B: That's amazing.

RW: There's also illusory insomniacs. So these are people who think that they're having a rough night's sleep and in fact you put them into a sleep lab and they're having a perfectly normal night's sleep, but they're dreaming about being awake.

B: Oh, awesome.

RW: It's the weirdest thing. So I've really got into dreaming and sleep, I think it's fascinating.

(12:02)

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Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:14:14)

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom but to set a limit to infinite error.

Bertolt Brecht

References