Richard Wiseman

Early life

Richard Wiseman was born and raised in Luton. His mother a seamstress and his father an engineer, he learned his trade as a teenage magician working the crowds in Covent Garden.

Like most magicians I got into magic really young. You open that book when you're in the library, and go "this is for me". It happened to me at about age eight.

At 18 he continued as a street performer and went to University College London to study psychology, partly because it "was right around the corner". He shared accommodation as a student with Adrian Owen, later also to become a psychologist. In his years as a street performer he learned how to adapt or get out of what you are doing because "Sometimes you would start your act and after five minutes there was no audience." He moved to Edinburgh where he obtained his PhD in Psychology from the University of Edinburgh. He went from there to the University of Hertfordshire, becoming Britain's first professor in the Public Understanding of Psychology.

In his early years at the University of Hertfordshire, Wiseman partnered with Simon Singh on a BBC segment about lying for the National Science Week. The segment spanned TV, radio and print and featured a "politician making a statement, and letting the public vote on whether they thought this figure was telling the truth in each medium." It was the first time that Wiseman and Singh met. From the beginning, the two got along well and on Singh's idea, ended up creating a show together called Theatre of Science. The show aimed to deliver science to the audience in an entertaining manner. Wiseman describes how one stunt involved standing in a cage between two Tesla coils while lightning struck the cage. Wiseman ended up writing The Luck Factor in part due to Singh as well. With the success of Singh's book, Fermat's Last Theorem, Singh introduced Wiseman to his agent and encouraged him to write a similar book in the psychology arena, which led to The Luck Factor.

Teaching

Wiseman is a professor in "public psychology" at the University of Hertfordshire who divides his time between London and Edinburgh. He's a skeptic who doesn't believe in extrasensory perception or prayer and who, as a former magician, is stunned that people fall for seances in a darkened room where every kind of trickery is available.

Psychological research

Wiseman is known for his critical examination and frequent debunking of unusual phenomena, including reports of paranormal phenomena. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). His research has been published in numerous academic journals, reported at various conferences, and featured on television.

Wiseman has studied the principles of good and bad luck, publishing the results in the self-help book The Luck Factor. He showed that both good and bad luck result from measurable habits; for example, lucky people, by expecting good luck, might expend more effort in their endeavours, resulting in more success, reinforcing their belief in good luck. Lucky people are outgoing and observant and therefore have many more chance encounters than unlucky people, each of which could bring a lucky opportunity. Moreover, lucky people are more likely to look on the bright side of 'bad' encounters. In a mental exercise describing being shot during a bank robbery, lucky people considered themselves lucky not to have been killed while unlucky people considered themselves unlucky to have been shot.

Public engagement of science

Some people will just see [his work] as fun and say, that's interesting. I would hope a few people then go slightly beyond that and look at the implications. I want people to find that for themselves.

Much of Wiseman's work tends to be oblique, as he prefers to make people go outside, discuss, research and think about the implications of his work rather than trying to convey his points in a 45-minute talk. So instead of talking directly about eyewitness testimony in law he would set something up that looked like it, something like the colour changing card trick. In this mind set he has presented keynote addresses to organisations around the world and in well known forums and congresses like the Swiss Economic Forum and ESOMAR Congress. Much of this work has involved helping organisation become more successful by embracing the lucky mind-set.

In 2001 Wiseman led LaughLab, an international experiment to find the world's funniest joke. The winning joke described a caller to emergency services who shoots his friend who has collapsed to comply with the instruction "First, let's make sure he's dead". The experiment also explored regional and cultural variations in humour. These public psychology experiments – such as enlisting people to name, and rate, their favourite gags in the search for the world's funniest jokes – have drawn hundreds of thousands of participants and plenty of press.

In 2011, Wiseman wrote the first section of a collaborative story at Libboo in an attempt to produce a full-length novel in two months. The final result of this experiment, was a novel called, Paradox: The Curious Life, and Mysterious Death, of Mr Joseph Wheeler.

In 2013 Richard Wiseman became the first guest curator at Edinburgh's International Science Festival. He participated in the festival with "Richard Wiseman's Beginners Guide to... Climate Change". In 2014 he does a repeat of his 'Beginners Guide to' but this time with 3 different talks:

Wiseman has also become a content creator on YouTube after uploading a video of the colour changing card trick in 2007 that has 6 million views as of January 2014. He is best known for his "Bets You Will Always Win" series, which has amassed over 60 million views throughout 10 videos. On 7 January 2014, Wiseman uploaded a video to a new channel called "59 Seconds" in promotion of his book of the same name.

Wiseman is a patron of the British Humanist Association and appeared in the Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People Christmas stage show organised by the New Humanist. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of Humanist Society Scotland.

Edinburgh Secret Society

The Edinburgh Secret Society organises events for those of a curious disposition. These include verbal, theatrical and experimental presentations intended to inform, entertain and bewilder. This group, as the name states, tends to be low key and has appeared in very few news outlets. The Society motto is 'The king cannot be saved, the king cannot make custard', which is one of many things the group won't openly say the meaning of. It is run by Peter Lamont, friend and colleague, and Richard Wiseman having events involving The Filmhouse, the British Science Association, Edinburgh's World of Illusions, and The Edinburgh International Science Festival. Through the Edinburgh Secret Society Wiseman has found a new following, hosting evenings of irreverent talks and entertainment on topics including self-help and dying. In February 2011 they staged 'An Evening of Death' in A Victorian Anatomy Theatre at the University of Edinburgh, an event that sold out its 250 tickets within minutes.

Television and press

Wiseman's research has been featured on over 150 television programmes, including Horizon, Equinox and World in Action. He is regularly heard on BBC Radio 4, including appearances on Start the Week, Midweek and the Today programme. Wiseman also makes numerous appearances on some British television shows; in The Real Hustle he explains the psychology behind many of the scams and confidence tricks; in Mind Games he's a regular team captain of a panel game of puzzles, anagrams and conundrums; and in People Watchers, a hidden-camera show examining human behaviour. Besides being interviewed in several of these television programmes, he was a creative consultant in an episode of Your Bleeped Up Brain and a researcher of the documentary Unlawful Killing.

Feature articles about his work have regularly appeared in The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian.

Wiseman's 2011 book, Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There was electronically self-published in the United States, as Wiseman was told by American publishers there was no interest in scepticism.

In 2011, Wiseman wrote the first section of a collaborative story at Libboo in an attempt to produce a full-length novel in two months. The final result of this experiment, was a novel called, Paradox: The Curious Life, and Mysterious Death, of Mr Joseph Wheeler.

Focus on paranormal

Wiseman is known for his critical examination and frequent debunking of unusual phenomena, including reports of paranormal phenomena. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). His research has been published in numerous academic journals, reported at various conferences, and featured on television.

In 2004, he took part in a preliminary test of Natasha Demkina, a young Russian woman who claims to have a special vision that allows her to see inside of people's bodies and diagnose illnesses. The test, whose validity has been disputed by Demkina's supporters, was featured in the Discovery Channel documentary, The Girl with X-Ray Eyes.

Wiseman has published studies on anomalistic psychology and the psychology of paranormal belief. He is the author of the book titled Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There (2011) which takes a psychological approach to paranormal phenomena. The book offers its readers tools to investigate paranormal claims using QR Codes, which Wiseman saw as "exciting use of new media" to allow people to see footage and make up their minds themselves.

Dream:ON The App

Wiseman launched the Dream:ON App at the Edinburgh International Science Festival 2012. It is developed and maintained by YUZA, a mobile experience team based in London. The app is powered by an engine which constantly monitors and adjusts the behaviour of Dream:ON; optimising the experience for the user. When the user enters the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep where dreaming is most common, the app delivers unique audio soundscapes which the subconscious is shown to respond to.

"We have created a new way of carrying out mass participation experiments. We still know relatively little about the science of dreaming and this app may provide a real breakthrough in changing how we dream, and record and track those dreams." – Professor Richard Wiseman

The App is also a social experiment: in the morning it presents you with a graph of your movement during the night, allows you to tag any of your friends who appeared in your dreams via Facebook and invites you to post a short description of your dream to their experimental 'Dream Bank'. Creating the world's largest dream experiment.

Awards

Books