Psychic Fail - The One (Aussie show)

TV NARRATOR: Who is The One? TV NARRATOR: From hundreds of applicants, we've narrowed the field to the top 10 psychics Australia has to offer. HOST: We dropped our psychics in the middle of a massive pine forest. HOST: There's a rescue chopper waiting for them. HOST: Our psychics have just 15 minutes to find the chopper. HOST: They've got a map that shows an outline of the area, HOST: and then something belonging to the pilot, so a personal effect, HOST: y'know, keys, wallet, something like that. HOST: And our psychics will use that to sense, you know, the right direction. How did they do? Let's have a look. Here are the paths of all ten psychics, as illustrated by the show. Only four actually found the helicopter. The rest of them just wandered around pretending their psychic power was actually guiding them. WOMAN: My guide said go straight, go straight, go straight. WOMAN: Yep, over here. WOMAN: Let's go angels. Two of them actually came within viewing distance of the helicopter, but their special ability failed to clue them in. MAN: I'll go with that, it's pulling me to the right. MAN: I have sense... I've got close, but I've passed it. You can see from the maps that most of them veer off to the right and get lost, rather than make a fairly straight path to the helicopter. Only two psychics actually head in a straight direction. So why did most of them veer to the right? Were their supernatural consults confusing them? MAN: I'm feeling, "go right." MAN: Just going where I'm being pulled to. WOMAN: I do, energetically, feel quite a pull in this direction. I need to go more this way. They mention a highway on the edge of the map. Were they being subconsciously drawn to the highway, perhaps by hearing cars in the distance? WOMAN: I'm still confused, I'm lost, I keep getting pulled to the highway. WOMAN: I don't know why. Or maybe it was the topography of the land - they were going in the direction of least resistance. Once a psychic finds a trail or the bush clears a bit, all of a sudden the psychic ability seems to pick up and they just know they're heading in the right direction. WOMAN: I'm just going, you know, I'm feeling a clearing coming up. MAN: I heard the words "RUN." You don't think it's simply the layout of the land giving you a hint? And the fact that a helicopter can only land in an area that's not covered by trees? MAN: I saw a bit of an opening, and I noticed the chopper. [reading on-screen text] One psychic is supernaturally guided to the helicopter, and look what she finds. WOMAN: I can see it! WOMAN: Oh no. WOMAN: It's the car. WOMAN: Terrible, back to the start. Remember, these aren't just any psychics, they are the top 10 in Australia. TV NARRATOR: "From hundreds of applicants, we've narrowed the field to the top 10 psychics Australia has to offer." What the psychics see in real life always seems confirm what they saw in their head, but it's always after the fact. Saying that you saw a stream in your mind, AFTER you see a stream in real life means absolutely nothing. MAN: When I saw the stream, it was a very significant moment for me. MAN: And it said for me to go on the left of the stream. MAN: So I wanna cross this and head towards this area. MAN: In my meditation, I got a bit of a valley. So I want to go into this valley area. MAN: I had the sun coming through as well so it feels like I'm heading in the right direction. MAN: Clairvoyantly, I saw different trees. These are all pines, MAN: and I saw like, gum trees, white gums, and you can see them there. WOMAN: Kept getting told there's gonna be gully, there's gonna be water, there's gonna be sand. WOMAN: So when I saw that, that was a big relief. WOMAN: Just up here. Anything they're sensing from their psychic abilities is a product of their own subconcious, human intuition, and imagination that ALL of us have. They are deceiving themselves if they think their ability is unique. RICHARD: It's undeniable, he went more or less straight to the helicopter, within six minutes, I think. RICHARD: Ah, but then we had somebody more or less running around in circles. RICHARD: It's just like we've got people in there looking and some get lucky and some don't. HOST: Ok Stacey, what gets in the way? STACeY: Fear blocks flow. They have a lot of pressure on them, they get scared, STACEY: they start to panic, and they let go of what they're hearing. HOST: Alright, Stacey and Richard, let's talk about this first challenge, shall we? HOST: Of ten psychics, four found the chopper. We're off to a pretty good start on The One, Stacey? STACEY: Oh, I think we are definitely. I mean, we had a very difficult challenge here. STACEY: People being very calm and deliberate and under pressure... STACEY: And they nailed it. STACEY: And they nailed it. HOST: Right. Next we move on to cold readings performed on audience members. I won't dwell too much on this, as there are plenty of sources available that demonstrate that cold reading is anything but psychic. The first season of this show was highly edited to make the psychics seem better than they actually were. The psychics were given 5 minutes to do a reading on someone, but only a minute or two of the reading was aired. Thus what we saw were all the hits plus a couple misses to make it realistic. [reading on-screen text] AUSTIN: Your boss, Number Two. AUSTIN: I understand that cat's involved in big underground drills. MISS FAGINA: How did you know? AUSTIN: I didn't, baby. AUSTIN: You just told me. LADY: was somebody I cared for a lot has left, so... The more information a person voluntarily gives the cold reader, the more he has to work with and the more convincing he becomes. LADY: Do you wait, or do you move on? PSYCHIC: Ok, alright. My sense is that this person is actually coming back into your life. Some people are better at cold reading than others, and have refined the art to minimise obvious blunders, but that doesn't make them psychic. PSYCHIC: I'll let it... I won't push you, but I want to acknowledge the dog or the pet. Um... PSYCHIC: Do you know someone that actually had cancer of the breast? LADY: No. PSYCHIC: That's still here? That's still in the physical world? LADY: No. PSYCHIC: Ok. PSYCHIC: I get that you wrote her a letter when she passed, can you understand that? LADY: In my mind. PSYCHIC: In your mind, ok because it's almost like she acknowledges that she receives the letter. PSYCHIC: So, I just wanted to bring through, is there a name "David" around you at all? PSYCHIC: Um, did you lose your father early, how old was he? LADY: No, I didn't lose him early, I lost him about 10 years ago. PSYCHIC: Where are we going now, sorry, they're jumping a little bit all over the place.. What I just did was use a few editing techniques to give the perception that these psychics were pretty hopeless. The TV show simply does the opposite: They string together a number of hits to make the psychic look quite impressive. PSYCHIC: Keeps showing me five...? LADY: My husband was one of five. PSYCHIC: See, that would make sense to me. Because he keeps showing me five, and normally that would mean to me there's five children... I think many so-called psychics honestly believe they are in touch with something supernatural. They've unwittingly practiced these cold reading skills, thinking they were actually honing their psychic abilities. They've built an entire belief system around their abilities, figuring out what methods work for them and what doesn't. The belief system allows them to easily explain away any shortcomings, and they do so fully believing their own excuses. RICHARD: is he was doing an awful lot of fishing RICHARD: and some of those things the lady in question could pick up on, RICHARD: and if you ask her now, she will forget most of what Michael said, RICHARD: but remember the few things that she interpreted to be true in her life. Enough said. STACEY: And they nailed it. HOST: Right.