SGU Episode 384
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| SGU Episode 384 |
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| 24th November 2012 |
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| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| 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. |
| 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
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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.
(5:38)
This Day in Skepticism (13:34)
- November 24, 1859: On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, is published
News Items
Aspartame Study (26:30)
Being a Psychopath (32:57)
Type Ia Supernova (45:19)
Fecal Transplants (55:56)
Science or Fiction (1:03:30)
Item number one. Some sharks can change their shape by inflating their body with water or air. Item number two. Some shark's poop comes out in a spiral pattern. Item number three. Some sharks can vomit out their own stomachs. Item number four. Sharks do not get cancer which is why cancer researchers frequently study them. And item number five. Sharks are affected by the Moon, leading them to kill more people.
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
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References
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