Natasha Mitchell: Welcome to All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, Natasha Mitchell joining you, great to have you on board. Every year in Las Vegas an unusual gathering called The Amazing Meeting is held. It's become the annual celebration of the so-called skeptics movement something of a faith gathering for the critically minded if you like.

Its founder, the magician The Amazing Randi, who some Australians will remember from the famous Carlos Hoax which he orchestrated and televised with 60 Minutes in 1988.

Excerpt, The Carlos Hoax:

Richard Carleton: The plane that brought Jose Alvarez, Carlos's channeller, and his manager Jorge Grillet to Sydney also carried another important passenger, the skeptic and magician James Randi. You see together with James Randi 60 Minutes created Carlos.

Carlos (Jose Alvarez): I am an attended master, I am a very old spirit.

Richard Carleton: Remember that first press conference hosted by our mystic?

Carlos (Jose Alvarez): First question...

Can you give us any idea what this event might be?

James Randi: It will be astronomical in nature.

Carlos (Jose Alvarez): It will be astronomical in nature.

Richard Carleton: While Carlos spoke to Sydney's assembled media, James Randi spoke to Carlos. He was concealed in the room next door and made less than spiritual contact with Jose Alvarez through high tech radio equipment.

Carlos (Jose Alvarez): Next question.

Will this have worldwide implications?

James Randi: Worldwide, of course...

Richard Carleton: In fact, there is no Carlos, nor was there one when we laid the seeds of this hoax in James Randi's home town of Fort Lauderdale in Florida. Randi is known throughout the world for his crusade to debunk mystics, but in this case we asked him to help...

James Randi: Well I've been to laboratories all over the world. Now I'm not, as I say, a scientist. And my other book I'm coming out with, this is going to be called 'A Magician in the Laboratory'. That's provocative enough I think just from the title, you know, what is a magician doing in the laboratory? But you see I have my expertise, I know how people are fooled and I know how they fool themselves. And many times I have been in the laboratory and I've found that that particular talent, although it's not an academic—I can't get a degree in how people fool themselves, or in magic or in conjuring for that matter, but it's a very valuable sense. Richard Feynman the Nobel Laureate many years ago once told me—and Isaac Asimov essentially the same thing—that my particular expertise should be given some sort of status in the educational system. I'm flattered by that of course but I think that people like myself who have this knowledge of how people fool themselves should be called in more frequently.

Natasha Mitchell: Illusion is James Randi's trade and he's notorious for exposing the tricks of psychics, even offering a million dollars to anyone who can demonstrate evidence of the paranormal or supernatural. But it's been over a decade since he made that challenge and not a single soul has come close. Australian science communicator and searching skeptic Mike McRae was at this year's Amazing Meeting hosted by Randi and today on All in the Mind he's excavating the skeptical mind in the classroom and beyond. What does it mean to call yourself a skeptic?

Mike McRae: I'm skeptical. About what? Well, pretty much everything. Is there anything I do believe in you might ask? That'd be a fair question if I were a cynic, a nihilist or a solipsist. So what then is a skeptic?

Skeptics have long been associated with doubt. The roots of the philosophy lie in ancient Greece where the teachings of a school of philosophers called the Skepticoi maintained that it was impossible to know anything with absolute certainty. This philosophical skepticism forms the core of today's scientific method.

Over the past century though a more active form of skepticism has developed with skeptic societies, clubs and gatherings sprouting up across the world. They mostly focus on investigating paranormal and pseudo scientific claims with a critical mind while promoting the benefits of thinking objectively, critically and scientifically. Yet to many, skeptic remains a dirty word. Are skeptics really like their closed-minded and dogmatic stereotype, or are they true free thinkers? James Randi.

James Randi: I think that many people mistake the word skeptic for the word cynic. 'Cynical', 'skeptical' seem to be rather the same word to them and that's not correct at all of course. A cynic is a much stronger term and I think it is not what we mean when we say skeptic. We mean people who demand evidence and think that they should require evidence before firming up their beliefs. Now science is the most skeptical art or discipline that I can imagine, because science always demands evidence. Not just suggestions and not just hints or possibilities and such, although some scientists will tell you, they say science doesn't discover facts, science discovers laws or rules that seem to govern the universe, that seem to express how the world works. But discovering facts, that's too strong a statement for some of them.

So again we're in another semantic morass of the actual meaning of words. And many people mistake another fact too, they think the dictionaries define words. They don't define words, they give common usage. So where are we, how do we know what we mean by words, or should mean by words? It's a difficult art.

Mike McRae: I'll come back to the conflict between, say, the words 'cynical' and 'skeptical' very shortly. However, I just want to pick up on your use of the term 'evidence' there. Skeptics are known for being, 'show me' people. Show me the evidence. Skepticism is quite right in suggesting that evidence is needed to make beliefs. Could it be though that people do believe that they use evidence even if that evidence in itself was not weighed perhaps as a scientist, or a skeptic, or a critical thinker might, and that could be a sticking point for skeptics communicating with people?

James Randi: Well again we've got definitions and usage for 'evidence'. I've never even thought of the idea of how do I go about defining 'evidence'...and then you've got the difference between evidence and hard evidence, and faith and blind faith. Now many people say oh faith is not science. But a scientist has faith in the fact that the sun will probably rise tomorrow and the sky will be blue if the clouds aren't there, and gravity will work tomorrow, it worked today, I remember I fell down stairs. So that's an expectation based upon again, evidence, you see.

Now as a magician—there's an interesting parallel—as a magician I know two things with a fair degree of certainty (a) how people are deceived, (b) how they deceive themselves, and that's a very important factor. In fact the more important of the two factors in my estimation.

Mike McRae: Magician and acclaimed skeptic James Randi.

Excerpt, Mythbusters:

When Kari, Tory and Grant zapped cockroaches with lethal radiation they found that the creepy crawlies could out-survive humans after a nuclear blast.

They are still moving...

But to truly test the invincibility of the roach they had one final trial.

All right the next myth is you cannot drown a cockroach. Supposedly they can survive a long time under water, much longer than humans.

That's the myth, but what's the plan?

Now to test this we're going to take five cockroaches, five little plastic containers, and just add water.

Mike McRae: The hugely popular TV show Mythbusters might not overtly describe itself as skeptical but amid the entertaining banter, the cockroaches and the explosions, the philosophy isn't hard to find. Adam Savage with co-host and straight man Jamie Hyneman has had a long and distinguished career in the special effects industry. As with James Randi, he knows all too well what it takes for the human mind to be fooled.

Excerpt, Mythbusters:

Okay guys, it's 30 minutes.

Let's see if they went into some sort of hibernation survival mode.

They look pretty dead to me.

Maybe a little CPR can kick-start these cockroaches.

Adam Savage: One of the best jobs I've had in the past ten years before being a Mythbuster was working as a special effects artist in Industrial Light and Magic for the Star Wars movies. And when I first got up there I was working next to a friend of mine who'd also just gotten up there and he said, 'Dude, you know what we are now, now that we're working at ILM?' And I said, 'What?' And he said, 'We're special effects wizards.' Because they always referred to us as that in interviews. And there is very much—the whole art of special effects is exactly the same kind of things that a magician is doing.

They are grabbing your attention with one thing to keep your attention away from another thing. When I detail the side of a space ship I am placing some details to capture your eye and to help you ignore that you might recognise other details from a model car kit. I'm using painting techniques to trick your eyes and absolutely that exercise in empathy, which really magic is, I mean fooling people's senses is an exercise in putting yourself in their heads and figuring out what it would take to fool yourself. And this exercise is what I think leads one towards a skeptical view of the universe, because you realise that properly applied even you can be fooled. In fact magicians make some of the best audiences because they know how it's supposed to have been done and when you foiled that look then they go completely haywire. So yeah, I absolutely think that portion of work in theatre, work in animation, work and special effects and model making, all of that informs the way I look at the world critically and a desire to break it down and see—you know, ask what the bigger questions are.

Mike McRae: Could that be a large key in how a lot of people become skeptical is that they have some life experience which shows that they have been tricked, or they have been fooled by their senses in some way?

Adam Savage: I wonder, it would be lovely if there was a simple formula with which you could give someone an ah ha moment because I'm sure that every single skeptical scientist and atheist has a moment when they just concluded that things were this way and it wasn't a bad thing, that it wasn't a battle between one thing and the other, it was a simple conclusion based on empirical data. If there is such a formula I'm searching for it.

Excerpt, Mythbusters:

Tomorrow arrives today, and...

What in the heck is going on?

Oh, he's alive.

Wow. That one is climbing up on the wall.

Number five is alive.

That one is alive, that one is alive.

They are all alive.

They are like little zombies, they came back from the dead.

Natasha Mitchell: Go the cockroaches and if I was pushed to admit it I do think the Mythbusters crew are thinking women's crumpet. There you have it. Adam Savage there, from the TV show Mythbusters. And there mightn't be a simple formula but are some people simply born to be skeptical thinkers? That's the question Mike McRae is asking for us today on All in the Mind. You're with ABC Radio National going global on Radio Australia and as podcast.

Excerpt, Mythbusters:

So we're going to call this one confirmed?

I guess so.

Absolutely.

That's cool, and I don't feel bad because we didn't kill any cockroaches.

Mike McRae: As social animals we are deeply influenced by what others think. And throughout most of evolutionary history, with life balanced on a knife's edge, it's been dangerous to question what's worked for our ancestors. Myths have long been used to account for natural events we can't explain.

Today's world affords us the luxury of challenging what's been taken as truth. But we do this with brains perhaps better suited to helping us survive, wandering the land in small, nomadic groups. Being skeptical simply might not be compatible with how our brains work.

Dr Martin Bridgestock is a senior lecturer in Griffith University's School of Science. His university course on skepticism is surprisingly one of the few taught in Australia.

Martin Bridgestock: There was a course offered in skepticism at the University of Queensland I believe a few years ago but that petered out and there's a scattering of courses, probably about 10 or 15 at any one time in the United States. Why people don't offer it more I don't know, I mean universities, if you look at the mission statements of universities, many of them say that they want to induce in their students some kind of critical, analytical thinking capacity and skepticism is one way of doing this because it combines critical and analytical thought with paranormal issues which students are often interested in. So to me that question is one which makes my mind a complete blank. I enjoy the course so much that I don't regret bringing it on at all.

Mike McRae: Now when it comes to combating mis-beliefs or misunderstandings most people just offer a contrary answer, almost a form of correction. Is it possible to teach people to be skeptical simply by providing them with contrary views?

Martin Bridgestock: I understand from certain courses that have been run in America that yes that can work up to a point. That is, if people think that something constitutes evidence for the paranormal and you produce an alternative explanation, you will affect some people's views. But there's a big catch with that. The catch is that nearly all students are young adults and they absolutely hate being told what to believe. So if you've just come into the lecture theatre and you give opinion, opinion, opinion, my explanation, my explanation there's going to be quite a lot of resentment, people are going to hate that. And after all it's not really what a university is about; a university is about telling people how to think and how to think in better ways. So what I focus on much more is the tools of critical and skeptical thinking. I don't actually bother what people come out believing in the end, what I want them to do is to show that they can understand these valuable critical methods of thinking.

And to give you a couple of examples of how it works, the second year we ever ran the course back in 2004, the student who came top of the entire year was in fact an advocate of alternative medicine. He believed quite strongly that some alternative medicines were very valid. And this year the student who's come top is in fact a devout Christian who actually believes that God created the universe and that doesn't bother me at all because both of these students demonstrated very clearly that they had mastered critical and analytical thinking. Their beliefs are their business, what's my business is whether they've actually mastered these methods of thinking.

Mike McRae: Can you really compare the two though with, say, a student who believes that God created the universe, which is really not something you can approach in a skeptical sort of fashion if you think, it's not like there's a for and against evidence, it's simply a faith. Whereas using alternative medicine is something which is a little more evidence based. So do you find that you have a lot more students coming out at the end who might retain certain religious or faith based beliefs, whereas a lot of other students tend to criticise their evidence-based beliefs a little bit more?

Martin Bridgestock: You quite astonish me with that question, Mike, because I've just been doing some research on what effect the course has on students' beliefs. As I say influencing their beliefs is not what the course is about, but obviously I wanted to know whether it was happening. So I gave them before and after questionnaires asking them what they believed in before the course and afterwards. And the effects are very dramatic. For some beliefs, such as extrasensory perception and clairvoyance, belief dropped like a stone, 20%, 30% fewer of them at the end believed than they did at the start. Creation science, there was almost no difference, basically the same percentage believed at the beginning and at the end. So yes, they are substantially different. My point is that I'm not out to tell them what to believe or to change their beliefs, that's not the primary purpose of what I'm doing. What I'm doing is trying to inculcate in them to certain methods of thought. And if at the end that student, that Creationist student, says at the end of it well yes, I understand these methods, I've shown you how I can apply them, I can criticise the evidence for various paranormal beliefs but nonetheless as a matter of faith I believe in one particular interpretation of the Bible. I have to say, fair enough.

Mike McRae: Now there are a lot of skeptics who might actually feel that skepticism and atheism are two things that go hand in hand. Do you follow that same philosophy?

Martin Bridgestock: Personally no I don't, my course does not deal with religion at all except where the religious belief can be tested. For example religious based healing, the kind of faith healing. Creationism where the Creationists believe that there is scientific evidence which shows that God created the universe in six days 10,000 years ago. But generally speaking I don't at all criticise or comment on religious beliefs, I try to keep them out of the course and that works both ways. I've had students in seminars take swipes at religious belief and I immediately intervene and say hey no, we don't do that. And on the other hand I've had students who have turned their seminars into basically forums for preaching their religious beliefs and again I've had to tell them no, that's not what the course is about. So I stay clear of religion. My own view is that if you imagine a person with religious belief, OK they believe in God but they also can see that this universe does obey scientific laws. and in that case there is nothing to stop them using the skeptical methods of thinking as a method for weeding out what's reliable or what's not in this world, regardless of their belief in another world.

So I don't believe that the two necessarily go hand in hand and it bothers me a little bit that so many skeptics do link them.

Mike McRae: How important is it that communicators of skeptical thinking understand the psychology of learning?

Martin Bridgestock: It's certainly very valuable for them to do so because if you have valuable ideas which the public could benefit from but you don't know how to communicate them, you don't know how to get them across to people and bring them alive and get people to see their value, then pretty well you're going to be a very ineffective skeptic indeed. And I think one of the problems of skepticism is the problem of public image, the problem of communicating what we're actually about. I've been quite amazed at how many cases people have said things which basically say that skeptics are nothing more than closed minded and naysayers, all they do is doubt things. And I had a very bright post-grad student from another university send me an email yesterday in which he said I am part way between a skeptic and a believer. Well in my view you can't be part way between a skeptic and a believer. A skeptic is somebody who believes if the evidence is sufficient to justify belief. And therefore a skeptic can be a believer, there's no middle ground.

Mike McRae: While many people might show themselves to be critically minded they mightn't describe themselves as skeptical. What, in your experience, does it take for somebody to nominate themselves as a skeptic?

Martin Bridgestock: I don't know. Clearly skepticism is a sub-set of critical thinking. Skepticism is critical thinking applied to paranormal claims, I think that's the simplest way of defining it. Now what therefore does it make for a person who is a critical thinker to regard themselves as a skeptic? Possibly it's a matter of interest, I could imagine critical thinkers about politics and critical thinkers about economics not having any interest in paranormal issues and therefore they wouldn't identify themselves as being skeptics. So possibly what it is, is simply that skepticism is critical thinking plus an interest in and a concern for paranormal issues.

Mike McRae: Now with shows like Mythbusters and recent books like Myth Conceptions by our own Dr Karl, it might be tempting to think that's becoming popular to become skeptical. Is this a sign of a change in public attitude towards skepticism?

Martin Bridgestock: I've seen no sign whatsoever of a change in public attitudes towards skepticism, none whatever. And all the polls, there's a lot of polls in the United States, are seen to show that there has been very little change indeed. We still have a situation in which something like 80% of the population subscribe to one or more paranormal beliefs. It may perhaps be that there are some people who are becoming more outspoken but I've seen no particular sign of a large scale change at all, no.

Mike McRae: Are you optimistic that there will be in the future?

Martin Bridgestock: We can always hope but that's not really what I can do. As I say, I don't presume to tell my students what to believe, but what I'm hoping is that if we can get enough people to be capable of thinking critically and skeptically so that there are people in every workplace, in every school staff room, in every family who know how to ask the right questions, who know how to talk about evidence and think about evidence, then that might possibly make a difference overall. That's all I'm really hoping for.

Mike McRae: Dr Martin Bridgestock from the School of Science at Griffith University.

George Hrab: There is no magic, there are no vampires, there are no werewolves.

Mike McRae: Skeptics are familiar characters in movies or television shows. For example, where would the X-Files be without Scully balancing Mulder's desire to believe? Yet they're typically portrayed as close-minded and naïve, unwilling to accept what's obvious to all and often dogmatically sticking to their preconceived notions of what the world should be like.

We're led to believe it's a good thing to follow your heart over reason and saying you know something to be true is far more appealing and far easier than saying something's false. Could this be the reason the word 'skeptic' is avoided in shows like Mythbusters, which is clearly skeptical in nature. Presenter Adam Savage.

Adam Savage: You know it's funny, it occurs to me that the word 'skeptic' doesn't appear on the show not by any design it just has never occurred to us but now that you've reminded me of this I am going to go back on Monday morning and start saying 'skeptic' on camera. Yeah, I do think the skeptics' movement has a negative public image, when I came down to the first Amazing Meeting with James Randi my higher-ups at the Discovery Channel were actually a little nervous and said do you really want to throw your lot in with them, they have a kind of a negative reputation. And my thinking is if that's a negative reputation it's exactly the kind of reputation that I want. These guys are fighting absolutely the best kind of fight and they are fighting it against—a good portion of the time it's against ignorance but a lot of the time it's against active avarice and thievery. And that's the part that gets me upset, psychics and faith healers, and ghost hunters—all of that crap.

Mike McRae: The word 'skeptic' means different things to different people. And as with atheism many are shaking off its negative connotations to reclaim it as a positive philosophy. Skepticism is a process of evaluation, we live in a world where information is in no short supply, where Google and Wiki have become verbs but not all information is useful. So what approach should self-described skeptics take? Without seeming arrogant, aggressively combating popular misconceptions with corrections might have actually done more harm than good. But research indicates we have a tendency to mis-remember the context of the information we receive and, after all, 150 years of skeptics questioning the effectiveness of homeopathy hasn't dissuaded its believers.

Perhaps skeptics should be concerned less with informing people what's incorrect in the world and more with educating young people in critical thinking.

George Hrab: There is no God, in the end that's more fair, isn't it?

James Randi: Well the first problem we have in the United States is we're just coming out about faith based administration. Oh, what a notion, faith based administration, almost a theocracy. Until we get a new administration in here we've got to think about the basic problem, we've got to get back to education.

Mike McRae: Magician and skeptic James Randi runs the James Randi Educational Foundation and is a founding fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

James Randi: We have classrooms where kids are not allowed to be told that organisms evolved over time and that if the word 'evolution' is used you've got to throw Creationism in at the same time which is an absolute pseudoscience, it's a pleasant notion for the feeble-minded, in my estimation. I'm very angry about this situation here in the United States so I would say the first stage we've got to go through is recovering. Let's move 20 years into the past and start again, because we have been plagued by this administration that as just stifled real education. Teachers here at this conference you're attending right here, we've got a lot of teachers out there and they've all come up to me one after the other saying let's get straightened out again. The door has been closed in our faces, we're on an escalator and we're going the wrong way. Education prepares you to observe how the real world works and deal with the real world and make it work for you.

We called it the James Randi Educational Foundation because I am not an academic, so I don't make any pretensions of being a scientist. I believe I'm a logical thinker as a matter of fact I have an honorary degree but it's a degree of humane letters and I don't even know what the letters are. Maybe only A through B, I'm not sure. Now nonetheless I'm proud of the honour of a degree but we called it educational because that's our bottom line, our purpose is to educate people not by jamming it down their throats but by making it entertaining, making it something that they're going to raise their eyebrows about and come over and want to take a closer look.

You have a very active skeptical communities in Australia of course, Richard Saunders for example spoke today. I look upon Australians in some ways 20 years in the past compared to certain other parts of the world but 30 years in the future in comparison to others. It's more or less a frontier country, it always has been and maybe it always will be, and I think that's a healthy attitude. We've got a horizon to go beyond. We've almost lost that in America I'm afraid. That's why I hope that Australia really adopts a good skeptical attitude.

I found it present when we did the Carlos hoax over there. I was in Copenhagen about two and a half months ago and a fellow ran through traffic, he came over and he said, 'Hi mate, I'm from Australia.' I shook him by the hand and I said, 'I doubt that because I'm a skeptic.' And he laughed, thank goodness, and he remembered the Carlos thing that we did. And he said, 'Oh, that was great, that was really great.' He really enjoyed it and he remembered it. Now that is an important fact, that they remembered the Carlos hoax that we pulled on Australia and that so many people were fooled by it for the moment and then they learned and turned around and said, oh, wow, I can be fooled.

Excerpt, The Carlos Hoax:

Carlos (Jose Alvarez): I have come to teach you.

Richard Carleton: First, just how easy is it to fool people. but even more importantly how easy is it to fool the media into giving out essential free publicity?

Carlos (Jose Alvarez): For ever, and ever, and ever. So be it.

James Randi: I can sit in a chair and I can say. 'I am very old', I can change my voice and they say. 'His voice changed!' Wow! My voice changes when I get a cold or a drink too much coffee.

Richard Carleton: Australia has a reputation for having the toughest interviewers anywhere, could our phoney mystic get past them and then go on to win himself a following?

Mike McRae: Carlos the phoney mystic did gain quite a following in Australia in 1998.

Nobody likes being told their way of thinking is flawed or that their most cherished beliefs are based on myth and misconception. Add to that the fact that humans tend to like absolutes—true and false, believer and heretic—and it's easy to see why age-old cultural beliefs often win out over science's dispassionate objective enquiry.

Encouraging a society to be more critical is no easy task. If you ask me if it's possible, I have only one answer: I'm skeptical.

Natasha Mitchell: Science communicator and educator Mike McRae there with that feature on skeptical enquiry. So I'm interested to know, do you identify as a skeptic? Pop into the All in the Mind blog on the show's website and let me know abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind which is where you'll also find the transcript, downloadable audio and email address. I'm Natasha Mitchell, not a card carrying member of the skeptics myself, but ever skeptical. Bye for now.