Investigating the Impossible

When I started this blog, I put at the top that you could expect to see, amongst other things, science and skepticism. Not been much of either so far - much more of a what I did on my holidays sort of blog! Will try and rectify.

Tonight I went to a Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub meeting - I try and go whenever I can, and every one I've been to so far has been entertaining. It was packed - 30 mins before the start it was standing room only - everyone coming to see Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Herfordshire. I've been reading his blog, and following him on Twitter for some time, and a few weeks ago was lucky to see him in the Godless show in London. But, it was great seeing him here in Sheffield, and sitting almost on the front row.

Richard's talk was entitled Investigating the Impossible, and as used to be a magician, started with some magic tricks. He then moved on to visual illusions - all designed to show how our brains make sense of things, sometimes making quite incorrect assumptions. As well as visual perceptions, there's some good audio ones as well - I challenge anyone to listen to Carmina Burana and hear the right lyrics again after listening to this.


Ytmnd -- Carmina Burana, alternate lyrics
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He took us through a lot of his research, on the psychology of luck, on perception, on why people believe in the paranormal and how it can be explained. His latest book, Paranormality, starts with the assumption that the paranormal doesn't exist, and then looks at what's interesting about it.

My favourite bit was his story about a Tomorrow's World episode, on firewalking. Richard believes that firewalking can be explained by the poor conductivity of wood, and over the 10 to 15 feet of most firewalks the heat does not get transfered to the feet. Firewalkers believe that they can harness their inner energy to protect their feet. So, Tomorrow's World constructed a 60 foot long firewalk, and as Richard says, the firewalkers will either burn their feet, or disprove the laws of physics. You can see what happened here.