(narrator) If he does his job well they want to be fooled.
(tutor) Uh, Sharla, could you pass that back? Wendy?
(narrator) From the astrology test each student was given a
detailed horoscope.
(tutor) Robin, could you pass that over.
(narrator) They were told it was drawn up by a professional
based on information they had supplied about when
and where they were born.
Actually, these horoscopes were not quite what they
appeared to be.
I'd like you to share something with me if you'd be so kind,
just with a show of hands...
(narrator) I asked the students to grade them for accuracy on a scale of one to five;
five being the most accurate.
Uh, how many gave it a one?
Let's see a show of hands. Two, three, four and five.
Okay.
So we scored pretty highly with this, then.
Let's do a little experiment.
You've got your horoscopes right in front of you.
Take them in your hand like this and hand them
over your shoulder to the person behind you,
okay everybody?
And the guy at the end down there you'll have to come up
to the front because these people in
the front don't have one now.
Okay?
Everybody change them around?
Everybody's got one.
Open up somebody else's horoscope and read it carefully, please.
(offscreen voice) This is the same thing.
Oh, it does!
This is the same as mine says!
What a surprise.
(narrator) They had all received the same horoscope.
The personality descriptions were generally true of everyone,
like recently you have had to recover from a disappointment.
Some of them seem specific because they were so personal.
Your sexual adjustment has presented some problems for you.
And there were others that anyone might hope would be true.
You have a great deal of unused capacity.
People like to believe certain things are true,
and they like to fall for very specific, absolutely,
enormously accurate horoscopes, right?
Of course they are.
Did you have a question? Yes, I have a question.
(offscreen voice) So why do people persist in ascribing to these systems?
That's the big question, of course,
and psychologically that is the most interesting question.
I think that people are trying to get some control
over their lives.
By knowing more about themselves of course they
get control over their lives, but that's what we're doing,
all of us, each and every day of our lives, whether it's financial,
whether it's emotional, whether it's a love interest,
whether it's health,
we're trying to get control of our lives,
we're looking for power and astrology offers you apparently
a very old and a very easy formula
whereby you can do that sort of thing.
What you've presented me today is evidence that
this can be misused or abused,
but you have not convinced me that there is nothing to this.
Oh no, no, I didn't intend to do that.
Okay, and I feel that your exercise today was kind of
cynical and one-sided and somehow it is wise to be
unbelieving of this sort of thing.
Well, I can't prove it doesn't work.
I can never prove it doesn't work.
And I've seen a lot of times where intellectuals have had,
have wanted to disprove mystical things because since it
didn't fit into their framework
of beliefs ... they wouldn't allow it.
But I can't prove to you that Santa Claus doesn't exist.
I really can't.
I can't disprove anything.
I can't prove a negative, but I can show you that
it's not very likely to be true.
That's the best I can do.
(narrator) Needless to say, my message isn't always popular.
My friend Ray Hyman is a psychologist and he has an idea why.
We seem to be taken, as we're taking something
away and not giving something in return,
and these people want something, they're looking
for something and I think we have to understand what
is it they're searching for and what they're seeking.
(narrator) Ray has an insider's perspective on these questions.
He once worked as a professional palm reader.
On a recent visit to Florida he allowed me to
observe while he gave readings to two volunteers.
Now, I want to look at a few other things before we
go very far.
I looked at your thumb, it's the most important.
Ray started reading palms to help put himself
through college.
There's a little narrowing of the second joint here.
That, that's tact, that's just tactfulness.
At the time he was convinced there was nothing to it.
Ah, this is the spiritual mental.
I had no belief that it would work, but to be
convincing I did read the books and I did study the
lines and told it as it's supposed to be told and to
my surprise it worked, and then it became a very
rapid believing in palm reading.
There's a break in your lifeline;
this is your lifeline right here,
so you've had some physical problems and you still may have some problems here,
some medical problems of some sort.
He was right about that; that I have had some
health problems.
Is there anything there about my mother?
About your mother - um, the one thing that,
the thing that's clear is that, uh, right from the
beginning, uh, you didn't want to be dominated by her.
You wanted to make up your own mind about what your
life was going to be like and so on.
I have been very headstrong when it comes to my mother,
and she has kind of tried to dominate me sometimes and I've
rebelled against it.
At the same time you wanted to be,
you wanted to be on your own terms and stuff like that.
He was pretty right on the money with a lot of things.
Maybe he's got some part to himself that others are
not in touch with and he knows these things.
....concerned about the relationship between your
mother and yourself.
(narrator) As a palm reader Ray was quite successful,
then a college friend bet him that he would do just as
well if he told his subjects the opposite of
what he read in their palms.
He decided to give it a try.
And I did this on my first client and she didn't say a word;
she had no reaction at all which is very spooky to me
because I'm used to feedback.
I thought it was because I bombed, but it turned out
because she was so stunned I was so accurate.
And this was really a shock to me because I had
done everything wrong, so I did the next client
wrong and then I realized it doesn't make a
difference what you tell them it's more what you
convince them how good you are and what you get them to believe.
(narrator) As a professional psychologist,
Ray is very much aware of the role that careful observation
can play in a reading.
You're living in a strange world.
You'd be better if you're living maybe 50,
40 years ago in some ways.
I've always said that, I should've been born a long time ago.
This present world is, is, presents problems for you
and you're not too happy with it.
You'd be much better...
From the way she was dressed and so on, I could
say that she'd rather be living in an earlier time than today;
in fact she was dressed for an earlier time anyway.
There's a change.
There's been uh, there for a while looked like you
had two jobs or two careers, I'm not sure,
and, uh, very recently you have switched.
In fact there's been a major career change.
I've been in the same career for six years.
Next year I'm thinking about changing careers,
but I haven't done it yet so he could just be a
little off on his timing.
If you set people up right you can tell them most anything.
If they've really got a creative and intelligent
mind they can make sense out of naught.
How crazy it seems to be, they can find a way of,
of reinterpreting it so it really fits them like a glove.
This person wants me to succeed.
I should work out some accommodation.
Well you certainly don't need someone to
deliberately fool you to have what seems to be a
psychic experience.
Your mind can create one all by itself.
Let's say you don't like to fly and you're worried
about a trip you're going to take then suddenly
during the flight the plane suddenly, whoa,
drops a few thousand feet because of a downdraft.
You might very well choose to think that you had some
kind of psychic intuition about this,
but what you forget is that you've had that same queasy
feeling every time you've gotten on an airplane and if it
doesn't fulfill itself, you forget about it.
You see, the brain is constantly searching for
relationships.
It's trying to work out cause and effect so we can
know what to expect in our lives.
That's natural.
The brain is very good at this but it does make mistakes,
and one way to explain these mistakes is by some kind
of psychic explanation.
My investigations have taken me to dozens of countries,
but until recently one of the most
interesting wasn't open to scrutiny.
It's long been rumored that Russia harbors
psychic talent like nowhere else in the world.
The country has an ancient,
mystical tradition, and the government has encouraged
psychic research.
To Moscow? That's right.
Any luggage to check in, sir?
Two pieces.
Now that the country is open to visitors, I wanted
to check things out for myself.
I've seen the films that came out during the Cold War.
Juno was a famous healer who had Brezhnev as a client.
Karl Nikolaiev could apparently turn on lights
with the force of his will.