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The glad scientist
Posted on Thursday, March 27, 2008 (CDT) by Thoth
 There can't be many scientists who, when asked to give a snapshot of their subject, ask for a deck of cards. But Professor Richard Wiseman isn't exactly your conventional scientist. As a child, far from planning a white-coated career in a lab, the young Wiseman was dreaming of wowing the world with mystery and magic. But while the two pursuits may seem very different, it was his experiences working as a professional magician that would eventually pull him into science.
One of the youngest members of the Magic Circle, it was his interest in the reactions of his audience as he baffled them with close-up magic (hence the cards) or wowed them as a street performer in Covent Garden that lead him to his study of psychology, gaining a first-class honours degree from University College London before coming north to take his doctorate at Edinburgh University.
"In the early days it was magic that I was really passionate about," says Wiseman, now 40. "But you can't really be into magic and performing without being interested in people. Well you can, but you wouldn't be very good. I was a performer and once you're interested in people, it's the everyday stuff that is most relevant."
And it's
"everyday stuff" on which Wiseman's built his impressive career, with
eight books to his name as well as a slew of television and media
appearances. Wiseman is Britain's first Professor of the Public
Understanding of Psychology, based at the University of Hertfordshire,
he has studied the paranormal, deception, superstition, luck and what
makes a joke funny. Now, he's turned his attention to names.
The idea for a study into
names came to him after a brainstorming session with Simon Gage, the
director of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, which begins
in the capital tomorrow.
Having already done some
work on surnames (did you know that those with negative sounding
initials such as DIE or RIP tend not to live as long as those without?)
Wiseman has been investigating what impact our names have on our lives.
Are Dirks more successful than Daves, Sallys more popular than Susans?
And with thousands of people having taken part in an online experiment,
Wiseman's obviously not alone in finding the topic of interest.
"The first question is, do
we all agree that some names sound successful and some not?" he says.
"The other question is about the attributes of those names and the
final question is does it matter – does name impact on people's lives?"
Wiseman will reveal his
results when he gives the festival's opening talk tomorrow evening, but
in the meantime, can he offer any reassurance as to whether new and
prospective parents are right to be filled with fear at the thought of
choosing their offspring's name? "I suspect all these effects are quite
small until you get into very silly names," he says. "Calling your
child Loser isn't going to be the best start."
This year marks the 20th
anniversary of the science festival and it'll be Wiseman's eighth year
at the event. Tomorrow's talk will be his fifth public lecture in a
week. Working as he does between Edinburgh and London, it's not
surprising that he's the most quoted psychologist in the media. He's
clearly a man with a lot to say.
Media savvy – he uses the
internet and YouTube to involve participants in his experiments –
Wiseman sees no contradiction in doing work that has popular appeal and
interest but also scientific merit. He's not worried about some of the
negative reactions prompted by the quirky nature of his experiments –
for Wiseman all publicity is good publicity.
"What I don't want to do is
produce something about which no-one has an opinion," he says. "That is
a bad day at the office. It's about trying to do things which are
interesting to people's lives, some of which will produce interesting
results and some of which won't. That's how science works – you don't
know the results before you go into it.
"My stuff is high-profile, it's designed that way, so you have to take the rough with the smooth."
For Wiseman, the way to
engage people in science is to make it relevant and accessible: "The
other way is to get people involved through mass participation. I've
always found that once people contribute data, when you publish the
results people then add in what their experience has been, what their
own data is. And at that point, they're doing science. It's a very easy
way in."
Wiseman routinely gets
between 10,000 and 15,000 participants in his experiments, and LaughLab
– in which he attempted to find out what the funniest joke was –
involved 1.5 million people. Not bad. You can see why he's
unsympathetic to those scientists who whine about not getting the media
coverage they believe their subject deserves.
"If journalists see
something that they think the public will be interested in they'll
report it," he says. "There's not some conspiracy against science. The
onus is on the communicators to come up with stories that compete with
celebrity stories or whatever is on the front page. And it's tough,
it's a really tough marketplace but that's the challenge."
Inspiration for Wiseman's
experiments comes from all over the place, but increasingly it's from
people who've attended one of his lectures. After speaking at the
Hayward Gallery in London recently an audience member suggested he
should do an experiment to determine whether cats and dogs respond to
humour differently. "This man told me that he has a cat and a dog. The
cat hates to be laughed at but if you laugh at the dog he joins in with
the joke," Wiseman explains. It's exactly the kind of topic to get him
going. "First of all is it true?" he asks. "You could easily do a
survey to find out what cat and dog owners think. Secondly, if it is
true, what's going on there? Is it to do with frequency (Wiseman one
conducted an experiment that found infrasound – such as the rumble of
pipes – often makes people think they're experiencing something
paranormal) or is it a social thing: can a cat really tell that you're
laughing at it?" Wiseman's enthusiasm is obvious. He's clearly a man
who relishes his work.
With characteristic brio,
he has drawn a parallel between science and art, suggesting that
science might be appreciated even when it's not understood.
"If you go to an art
gallery there's not an explanation on how to produce art, you just look
at it and you like it or you don't, whatever," he says. "I argue that
maybe we shouldn't worry too much about people understanding science
but appreciating what it's done. Some people are very happy to proclaim
scientific ignorance but if people were to do that about other cultural
activities – literature, theatre – that would be viewed as very
strange. That's why I feel science should be integrated more into
culture in terms of what it has done and what it can do."
He's often described as a
debunker – particularly related to his work on ghosts and the
paranormal. If that implies a kind of removing of the mystery of
things, there's another sense in which Wiseman's work is all about
revealing the scientific wonder behind the most innocuous events.
"It's just more interesting
to think that there's loads more going on in most instances than we
realise," he says. Citing as an example our ability to tell when we're
being lied to, he adds: "Often you have no idea why you sense that a
person's lying because you're not aware of the huge amount of
information that you've processed that's helped you come to that
decision. I think understanding that makes it more interesting not less
interesting."
Wiseman coined the term
"quirkology" – also the title of his book – as an umbrella term to
cover the kind of work that he does, partly because he wanted to neatly
package sometimes disparate work and partly because there is a feeling
of wanting to stick together when you're attempting to do something
different. Does he feel like a renegade I wonder?
"Yeah, I actually do feel
that now. Funding is getting harder and harder for this sort of thing,"
he says. "It's all going into neuroscience – what parts of the brain
light up for what reason. There's only a few people doing this weirder
stuff and they do it on a shoestring normally so it does feel like a
little movement which might take off, might not, who knows?"
Just like one of his experiments. But I get the feeling that Wiseman will make it work.
Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives (Macmillan) is published as a paperback on 4 April.
Copyright: The Scotsman
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