"At £20, 30, 40, £50 - that's yours, OK?" "You thought deciding to watch this programme was a logical, rational decision made with free will." "This man says you're wrong." "You think you can easily choose the picture you prefer." "These researchers say you almost certainly can't." "I don't know, he looks a little bit like a Hobbit." "You think this is the first time you've seen this TV documentary?" "But this man says you might have well have seen it before - because of your ability to look into the future." "To look into the future." "To look into the future." "Making decisions, even simple ones, is a tricky process and you're very, very bad at it." "That, and that." "Thank goodness, for this man, who's going to rescue you with maths." "You have almost like a 95% chance with this girl." "It looks like maybe you could buy those shoes." "Really?" "Would you buy them?" "That's the right answer." "So, congratulations on finding yourself watching this programme." "It might well be the best decision you've ever made." "...is greater than one, you'd be better off watching Horizon." "Oh, thanks so much for working that out for me!" "We're all faced with thousands of decisions every day and, according to science, the choices we make are often bad ones." "Most of the time we're behaving in the flow of the moment, we're faced with this uncertain world and we're doing our best and often we're wrong." "Our grip on reality is not always as tight as we'd like to think." "We think we have a stronger awareness of our surrounding and our choices and the reasons for our actions than we actually have." "But there is hope." "The same science that identified the problems can also help." "It works, it does." "If I don't use it," "I often make the wrong decision." "In this programme we're going to show you how to be more rational and deal with some of life's biggest decisions." "These men are computer enthusiasts, engineers and rocket scientists, and they've got a problem." "I feel like a creative person who's been logically trained through my engineering degree." "I'm interested in how things work and taking things apart." "Even with an average IQ of...quite a lot, none of them has a girlfriend." "I'm the president of a LAN gaming group, where a bunch of guys get together and play games." "My favourite ones are strategic-type games." "I like ruling the world." "Those are the fun-type games." "Are there lots of girls that come into your group?" "No." "The guys have decided to turn their backs on the single life." "The trouble is, they've spent years deciding to play computer games that deciding how to approach a potential partner is proving...difficult." "Happily, we've found a man who can help, and what's more, he speaks their language." "Mathematician Garth Sundem believes he can solve complex human problems, like deciding on a suitable girlfriend, using numbers." "Decision-making and mathematics, it's strange, they share exactly the same language." "You have a problem that you want to solve and you look at the factors that you are going to weigh against each other to solve this problem." "It's really the same language." "This perfect relationship led Garth to write a book of equations for every tricky situation life has to offer." "He thinks that if you really want to come to a truly logical conclusion, you need to weigh up all the factors and make them interact, using algebra." "My chances of getting a date with someone would depend on factors like how attractive, you know, you are." "How attractive they are, that would be an obvious ratio comparison right there that would affect your chances of getting a date." "Tonight, Garth is offering his services to Levi, John, Cal and Chris, who are putting their faith in maths." "The needy nerds are on a mission - to make friends with a lady, a real one, in a bar." "# Ah, chocolate girl" "# Well, you're looking like something I want" "# Finding out true love is blind... #" "OK, so you guys have all been downstairs." "There's someone you're thinking about." "We're gonna figure out your chances." "We're gonna see what the maths says." "How witty a conversationalist are you, from one to ten?" "I'm fantastically witty." "I'd probably give him a ten on the..." "Would you give him a ten?" "OK, we'll give him a ten." "The "Do I stand a chance with her?" equation is split into sections - social skills like conversation, levels of previous contact, and, crucially, attractiveness." "How attractive is this guy?" "Eight." "An eight." "We'll give him an eight." "He's a cutie." "Now, how attractive is she, on a scale of one to ten?" "Seven and a half." "Do you want to call that a seven or an eight?" "Seven." "OK, seven." "The attractiveness ratio is a key factor that drives the whole equation." "As the boy becomes more attractive relative to his love interest, so his overall chances improve." "Here we got 1, 1.4, we're going to pretty much call this 9, 35 - you have almost a 95% chance with this girl." "What really drove that is the fact that you are actually more attractive than this girl, you are a very witty conversationalist - you're pretty much like a dream guy." "Does that sound right to you guys?" "The remaining guys are also subjected to Garth's geek logic system and given their personal likelihood of success." "OK, are you ready for the math?" "No, I don't want math." "You don't want to do the math." "No, I can do it on my own!" "OK." "No math to mess up your Jedi mojo." "No." "OK, go on totally without." "So we've got, we've got like 95%, we got 43%, we got 41%, and we got" ""heck with the per cent, I'm just going to go do it." See how it goes." "Cal, at 95%, shouldn't have to try too hard." "But Cal's dream girl turns out to be 95% certain she's not interested." "According to his 41% score John should be struggling, but he's not." "43% Chris tries his hand at brutal honesty..." "I'm double major, computer science and computer engineering." "Oh, wow!" "Yeah, kind of a nerdy guy." "Soon discovering that it works a lot better than playing it cool." "In no time at all, the phone number's in the bag." "5046." "This experiment was meant to see if the maths could predict our volunteers' success, but we've discovered something more interesting." "Simply analysing the decision beforehand seems to have given them the confidence of seasoned Casanovas, whatever their score." "I'll give you a call." "Well, thanks once again." "In no time at all, everybody's taking phone numbers..." "Everybody, that is, except Levi, who rejected Garth's magic numbers." "He's still got way too much to think about, and fails to perform...as usual." "Good evening, success all around, we got a yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, right?" "No." "No?" "What happened?" "I should have followed the math." "You should have followed the math!" "Everybody but the no-math guy!" "Next time." "Next time." "So here in a nutshell is your guide to logical decision-making." "Identify all the factors that affect the decision." "Write them down." "Even weight them using mathematics." "And remember, freeing your mind with maths could help you become a truly rational person." "But of course it's not quite that simple." "Problem is that you routinely come to quite different conclusions about the same problem depending on how you look at it, which isn't very rational at all." "Pete Firmin is a magician." "He can confuse, misdirect and bamboozle." "So 51 are face up, only one is face down, what was it the seven of?" "Seven of hearts." "Seven of hearts." "Take it out, turn it face up, the seven of hearts." "Thanks guys, cheers." "Today, Pete's in London's Spitalfields Market working for us, and he wants to give away our money." "Inside my pocket I've got 20 quid," "£20, 30, 40, £50 - feel it, touch it." "You can walk away with that or if you want to, we could have a little game of roulette, 50-50 odds, and you could up it to £50, but if you lose you get nothing, I get the twenty back." "The decision to take the 20 or gamble is theirs alone - except that what they don't know is that Pete is manipulating them." "Even odds." "It's a trick." "No, no, it's not a trick." "If you want to, you can walk away..." "The way he presents the proposition is subtly different." "I'm going to give you twenty quid." "In the first case, the punter is presented with a freebie, a nice surprise." "This is called a gain scenario." "Here's 20 quid, you take that." "You can take that, you can walk away, it's yours." "Go and buy lunch, whatever you want to do, or you can gamble and maybe win 50." "What do you want to do?" "OK" " I've got ten, 20, 30." "In the second case, the punter gets an even nicer surprise." "Real money here." "I've got 50 quid, all right?" "That's 10, 20, 30, 40, £50 - that's yours, OK?" "But is then almost immediately presented with what is called a loss scenario." "I'm going to take 30 of it back." "If you want to win this you're going to have gamble." "What do you want to do?" "The outcome to both scenarios is identical - keep 20 or gamble for 50." "We want to see if the decision to gamble can be affected by the way the proposition is made." "I'll gamble." "You'll gamble." "I'll gamble." "OK." "In our rigorously scientific study in Spitalfields Market, those who felt they were losing out were more likely to gamble to win the money back." "Red does win £50." "Congratulations." "As opposed to those punters who were presented with a gain..." "Here's 20 quid, all right?" "..who decided to stick with their unexpected good fortune." "I'm going to take the money." "You're going to take the money?" "Well done!" "Fair enough, sir, fair enough." "Without realising it, our volunteers had decided on risk..." "Oh, I'm sorry." "It's a red so I keep the money. .." "Or safety." "I'm going to walk away." "Fair enough, have it with my compliments." "Simply because of perception of loss or gain." "OK, Jessica, now I tell you the instruction for playing this game." "So you are going to enter in that scanner." "You have two options." "One option you can keep for sure £30." "That is a safe option." "Or you can feel, be more risky and play a gamble in which you can win all £50 or lose all of them." "OK?" "Benedetto De Martino is performing the same experiment that we tried out at Spitalfields Market." "By performing the gambling experiment in an FMRI scanner Benedetto is hoping to see what is going on in the brain of the person making decisions in the face of loss or gain." "OK, Jessica, we are starting now the experiment." "Good luck, try to make as much money as you can." "Thanks." "Each new loss or gain scenario is called a frame." "Benedetto's experiment has hundreds of variations on the theme - pairs of identical choices presented in subtly different ways." "Across the board, just as in the street experiment, the loss frames produced more inclination to gamble than the gain frames." "This so-called framing effect was first observed 30 years ago." "Psychologists discovered that if a decision is taken to avoid a loss it will be a bolder, more aggressive decision than one taken to merely achieve a gain." "The idea is called Prospect Theory and explains an awful lot of apparently irrational decisions." "New York taxi drivers tend to determine their hours of work by their earnings." "When they reach their target, they go home." "Though this seems sensible, it does reveal a lapse in rational thought." "Because on slow days, the taxi driver, motivated by the loss of not reaching the target, will work for more hours than on a fast day, where the gain of greater earnings once the target has been quickly reached" "does not produce the desire to continue working." "Of course it would be more rational to work longer on a fast day and knock off early on a slow day, but this is nothing to do with logic." "Perception of loss or gain drives human decision-making in every aspect of existence, from choosing where to live..." "..to deciding to go to war." "Prospect Theory observes that we are not always rational about decisions, but it was not until Benedetto scanned his gamblers that anyone could understand why." "What we found, and what was already described 30 years ago by Prospect Theory, is the fact that people are not completely rational and also the fact that the emotion, they play a big role in the decision." "What Benedetto discovered was that in every case it was the emotional centre of the brain, the amygdala, which lit up." "On contrary of what is the common sense that people that are very rational, they don't have emotion at all, we found that every one of us processes emotion but there are some people can kind of control this" "initial emotional response that every one of us has." "But Benedetto discovered something more." "He noticed that there was a part of the frontal lobe that was also active during the decision-making task, but the amount of activity varied dramatically between the volunteers." "And what we think this area was doing was practically controlling the emotional response." "So everyone has an initial emotional response, but there are people that can control these emotional responses better with their frontal lobe, and they can just practically approximate a more rational behaviour, a more consistent behaviour." "The reason that we are able to make rational decisions at all is because of our magnificent frontal lobes." "Ours are almost five times bigger than our closest relatives'." "What's more our unique mix of brain cell types means that our frontal lobes can out-decide even the greatest great ape." "It's only when they stop working properly that we truly appreciate how important our frontal lobes are to decision-making." "After 200 yards, turn right." "Shana Sewell can't make the kind of spontaneous decisions that most of us take for granted." "Turn left." "Since a brain haemorrhage damaged her left frontal lobe in 2003, even a trip to the supermarket is a nightmare." "Turn around when possible." "Right you are." "Shana's brain injury reveals that making even a simple decision is in fact complex." "For Shana, every trivial choice must be anticipated, analysed and planned." "Tomatoes and cucumber." "Spontaneity is a thing of the past." "The process I have to go through when I'm food shopping is I start off with my planning so I feel that I've got every eventuality covered." "Yeah, that one, please." "'I know exactly what I'm getting, what type of thing I'm getting.' Chocolate biscuits!" "It's not on the list." "Difficulties arise when there's different offers on." "Is it more economical to buy a whole chicken or buy chicken fillets?" "I find it stressful." "No, we don't do, no." "I don't like chicken!" "I get confused." "But it's going to take me longer to...cook a whole chicken." "Maybe it won't, I don't know." "Anything that is out of routine causes me problems." "Corbin, what do we have when mummy makes, cooks chicken?" "The problem is so severe that every aisle presents the challenge of a fresh decision." "Imagine having to weigh up all the pros and cons for types of biscuits." "I'd rather we didn't." "Why?" "Because..." "Or bread." "Or grapes." "No, I don't think they are on the list." "Or crisps or mushrooms, or soap or soup, or toothpaste or anything." "What yoghurts do you want?" "Shana has undergone six months of intensive rehabilitation where she has been taught to externalise her decision-making." "I've got the praise if she doesn't revise." "Now I... ..By putting all the options down on paper." "The cons." "She might rebel, not only as in having a go at me but I mean rebel as in "Oh, I'm not doing it."" "The paper strategy works well for Shana, but it's one that requires her total concentration." "PHONE BEEPS Sorry, I'm beeping." "A reminder to take her tablets in the middle of the decision task proves to be disastrous." "Time to take your tablet?" "Yeah but it beeps early and..." "Is that what you're due to take now?" "Yeah." "Do you need a glass of water?" "Yeah, please." "No." "Um..." "I can take it..." "Oh, I don't know my main goal now, you see, this is not fair." "I should have reset it." "I know!" "I'll leave them there to remind me to take them after..." "When we've finished the session and I've finished showing you..." "When I've made my decision." "Back to Chloe's revision." "Yeah to miss an opportunity..." "Shana will always have problems with spontaneous decision-making but the systematic approach means she can now get on with her life even though she sometimes finds it frustrating." "It takes up a lot of time, but it works." "It does - if I don't use it, I quite often make the wrong decision." "You're building..." "A case." "A case for which option?" "For option two?" "Revising, yeah." "Shall we go and take, find a glass of water for your tablet?" "Good idea." "Thank you." "All right, thanks very much." "But there's another problem." "These men have discovered that sometimes your brain appears to conspire against you, and no amount of scribbling can solve that." "Petter Johansson is forcing people to make decisions." "This one." "It's a simple enough task for most people, and in fact it isn't the real point of the experiment." "Why did you prefer that one?" "Higher cheekbones, slightly better hair." "Not much between them." "Petter Johansson and Lars Hall have devised an experiment which calls into question many of our assumptions about how we make most of our everyday decisions." "We're interested to see what kind of detail, the representations behind peoples' decisions and what kind of insight they have about those decisions." "Why did you choose this one?" "It looks like it would be someone with a very interesting personality." "This is all quite boring - until you look at the experiment from a different perspective." "We added a twist, a card trick, so that sometimes they choose one face but end up with the other one." "Watch carefully." "The volunteer chooses the card on the left." "This one." "But Petter swaps the card, and presents the photo that was seen on the right and was actually rejected." "It is a card trick, but it's a cheap card trick based on something that the magicians call black on black." "So for each card there is a hidden card behind it which is actually the opposite one." "Where we slide the other card over, the black card is hidden and then" "Petter just uses his arm to...slide it down into his lap." "I mean, it's two parts that's interesting here." "First the fact that they don't notice when you switch the pictures." "It's interesting in itself and it's quite, quite surprising." "And the second part is of course the verbal reports to give that actually motivate choices they didn't make." "80% of the people we tested had absolutely no idea that a switch had been made." "Again this one just struck me, interesting shot." "Since I'm a photographer, I like the way that it's lit and looks." "It's a puzzling phenomenon." "This one." "Lars and Petter think that it can only be understood by looking at our fundamental relationship with our surroundings." "We rely upon the world." "The world is dependable, so if you reach for your car keys you don't end up with the armadillo in your lap or something like that." "The one on the left." "It might also be that we simply can't countenance our decisions being wrong." "Once we've made up our minds there's far too much invested to back pedal." "We simply post-rationalise and pretend that it was a great choice all along." "He just seemed friendlier." "Friendlier?" "Yeah." "If you want to keep irrational decision-making at bay, here's what to do." "Watch out for loss or gain situations." "Realise that emotions are an essential part of all decisions, but try not to let them get the upper hand." "Even if you can't face writing an equation, at least write down your options and canvass opinion." "And remember your nasty tendency to dress up bad decisions as great ones." "Garth Sundem has taken all these irrational factors on board in his quest for the perfect equation." "He's hoping to discover if his new improved formulae can help with one of the most emotional of all human decisions." "These are my favourite so far." "OK, would you like some help deciding?" "Well, what is this?" "OK I'm coming over here, so here's what we're going to do." "How attractive would you consider yourself right now?" "I'll give myself a five." "Solid ten." "Solid ten!" "Then that's like..." "In this context, sort of a Sarah Jessica Parker." "In this equation, Garth covers all the logical considerations like cost and comfort, but straight away he's also dealt with what the shoes will do emotionally for the purchaser." "I would be a seven with these shoes." "So it changes by at least two?" "Yeah." "Cool." "Say a seven." "OK, bump you up a bunch on that scale." "And there's even an interesting take on Prospect Theory." "Are you seeing anybody right now?" "No." "Are you, you're..." "Are you not married?" "I am not married." "I'm married." "Married, OK." "We're dating." "Yes, we are." "Living together?" "No." "OK." "As your relationship status heads towards marriage, the effect of increased shoe-based attractiveness ebbs away." "The gain of a stable relationship means that you no longer need to aggressively pursue risky footwear." "Seven up front, we've got five over fifteen here which is a little less than a half." "Square root of that is going to be, I don't know what, like 26ish." "I'm glad you understand this, OK." "It is four over ten and deserving it at a five..." "Unfortunately it's going to come out a bit below one so not the day for those specific shoes." "It's going to turn out greater than one and it looks like maybe you could buy those shoes." "Really?" "Does that sound good, would you buy them?" "That's the right answer." "Is that the right answer?" "Sure." "Really?" "Absolutely." "Those are them." "If the math had come out differently would it have changed your mind?" "No, it's just numbers." "I think the equation was probably a little female-centric." "A lot of the variables in the equation didn't relate to men." "I think for men it's probably more of a straightforward process." "So your total is $617.74." "Well, the equation said I shouldn't buy the shoes, which made the decision a little easier because they were a little out of my price range." "I did not buy the green shoes even though I really, really liked them." "So you went against the recommendation of the maths?" "I went against the recommendation of the maths but I have my own decision-making system in place " "I'm going to think about it and if I'm still pining for them then I'll come back and get them." "So far, so good - decision-making sorted, rational strategies put in place and emotions in check." "But be warned, it gets worse." "Because decision-making has another, darker element." "In 1996, Professor John Bargh shocked and outraged his fellow psychologists by publishing studies which controversially showed that our decisions can be subliminally manipulated." "I had fruit thrown at me at talks when I gave these results in the '90s and they were joking, but I had apples and oranges lobbed at me because they thought, "You're going too far."" "I've ceased being surprised at the results of these studies but only because of all the long experience that these things keep working." "The subliminal effect that rattled so many cages is called priming." "You're watching television or watching a movie or reading a book and what's happening in the movie or TV could be someone doing something very brave." "And that just by itself activates ideas and the concept of bravery, and you might be more likely to see another person as a brave person or another person as a kind person or an intelligent person more than usual," "and more than you would have, had the prior event not happened." "That's the nature of priming." "Images and even words slipping thoughts and feelings into our subconscious is one thing, but what is more worrying is how those thoughts and feelings can then change our behaviour." "Today, one of John Bargh's PhD students is running an experiment to investigate the priming effects of temperature." "What we do in our experiment, we very briefly expose people to a warm or cold substance." "And what we expect to happen is that simple experience with a warm substance or a cold substance will prime people to sort of activate these feelings of warmth and comfort and the things that we've learnt about since we were very young." "'And when we have those things in mind, 'those things we know will colour people's judgements and decisions and their behaviours as well.'" "Volunteers for the experiment are asked to hold a warm cup of coffee as they are met by Lawrence." "They have been primed with heat." "The purpose of the experiment is to record participants' judgments about Lawrence's colleague Randy." "How was your break?" "It was awesome." "It was good until I got stranded in Florida." "What happened?" "Because of a snowstorm." "In New York on Friday so I got stranded." "The theory is that the hot drink will somehow elicit positive feelings towards Randy even several minutes after experiencing the warmth of the cup." "And here's the killer question - would you give Randy a permanent job?" "Based on your brief interaction with Randy, would you hire him as project manager?" "He seemed like a genuinely friendly guy." "So, yeah, I would say so." "Yeah, why not?" "Sure." "Yes." "Yes." "Saying warm and friendly things about a stranger might just be the normal polite response." "Will you hold this for a sec?" "Sure." "Can you hold this for a second?" "Sure." "Can you hold this for a second?" "Except for the temperature of the drink, identical conditions." "The same conversation with Randy." "How was your break?" "It was good." "Are you glad to be back?" "Not really." "And six minutes later, the same questions from Lawrence." "Based on your brief interaction with him, would you recommend him or would you hire Randy as project manager?" "Uh..." "As a leader?" "I'm not sure." "Based on the brief interaction...no." "Maybe not from the impression that I got." "The experiment shows, remarkably, that a brief encounter with a beverage could see you either hired or fired." "It's a powerful effect, and one that might have worrying applications." "In the case of say, consumer products, feeling warm about a product presumably would make you more likely to buy it." "Feeling warm about a spokesperson may make you be more likely to listen to that person and trust their judgment." "So beware politicians handing you cups of coffee, right?" "Essentially yes." "People say, "How can you get these effects with such a small manipulation" ""and moving people's behaviour?"" "And we also get a little defensive when we hear that and, "I don't know!" ""It just keeps working!"" "We do these things and they work and that's... "Sorry, but they do,"" "and now our job is to understand and try to explain to people why that is." "Why the human mind is constructed in the way that you can get these effects at all." "If you think that priming is a little hard to take, meet a man who believes that our decisions are affected by what we don't yet know." "Dean Radin is one of the world's leading researchers into psychic phenomena." "There is a certain taboo about this topic." "When science evolved away from the paranormal and the supernatural, there has been certain pieces of our ancient heritage that were left aside." "Telepathy and clairvoyance and precognition and premonition." "I'm interested in expanding what we currently know, which almost by definition means you're challenging known theories, and people don't like their theories to be challenged, so...oh, well." "If you've ever wondered if premonitions are more than ordinary anticipation, if jumping out of the way just before that tree fell down was more than coincidence, you are not alone." "Dr Radin has designed an experiment that has made many mainstream scientists very upset indeed, because he believes it provides proof of precognition - the ability to look into the future." "One of the implications of this for decision-making is that when we make a decision, we think of it in conventional terms is we're making the decision based on our memory and our expectations." "It's all past stuff which is processed in the way that allows us to make the decision." "What these experiments suggest is probably a lot of the decision-making is based on the past, but some of it is based on what is about to occur." "Knowing the future when it comes to making a decision would be pretty handy for anybody, but there are professions where such a skill could mean the difference between life and death." "These men are three of the best pilots in America." "They are graduates of the US Navy's legendary Top Gun programme." "Lts Snodgrass, Kamir and Appazzato were so good, they stayed on as instructors." "What makes them so successful is their ability to make decisions and, more importantly, predictions upside down, being crushed by gravity, travelling at the speed of sound." "It's a 3D dynamic environment and they're constantly changing over time so you have to be very quick with your thought process." "You've got to take into account your own aircraft's energy, your altitude, attitude, how many knots you have in the jet, how fast you are going." "You have got to take all that in relationship to your opponent or the threat." "And it's all happening at three, four, five hundred knots." "Check left." "Left." "There are a lot of things to consider in a dogfight." "The Top Gun pilots are at the top of their tree, but even at this level some pilots are consistently better - better at anticipation and better in combat." "It does make you wonder why some pilots are better able to grasp spatial concepts better than others but most people just chalk it up to better spatial orientation, a better ability to take concepts on board than other pilots." "The unexplained aptitude of the few is difficult to clearly define but its effect is borne out by hard data." "In every armed conflict since World War One, just 4% of fighter pilots have accounted for 40% of total kills." "The military call this exceptional situational awareness, but it might be that some pilots are simply able to exploit the precognitive abilities that we, perhaps, might all possess." "Some pilots have an innate ability to do this better than others." "Whether you call that prediction or projection, I don't know what it is." "I'd like to think it was training, but there are some pilots who are innately better fighter pilots than others." "Turn...this." "Dr Dean Radin is hoping that he can prove that what the pilots call prediction could in fact be precognition - a real ability to actually sense the future." "His experiment records a person's emotional response to a series of pictures." "The images are from an internationally approved clinical test for emotional response and are selected by the computer at random." "Well, what we're expecting to see is that after a picture is seen, if it's an emotional picture, you'll get a large rise in skin conductance." "And after a calm picture the person remains calm, it'll continue to go down." "So far so good, and unremarkable." "But what Dean is looking for is what happens BEFORE the randomly selected picture is shown." "What we hope to see then is that before the emotional picture, skin conductance will already begin to go up and before the calm pictures, skin conductance will remain low." "And if that occurs, then it shows that there is some aspect of us that is able to outguess what is otherwise a random process." "If this happens, then Dean will have tangible evidence of an ability to sense the future." "But for the experiment to carry any weight, the effect has to be observed consistently." "Well, it if happens completely randomly, it's guessing." "If it happens in such a way so that it is systematic then it suggests that it's not guessing, but it's actually some perception of the future." "Dean's analysed the data from his experiments." "This is the sector, the period before the picture appeared, and as you see, in both cases anticipation of what you are about to see." "They show that for three or more seconds before an image is shown, skin conductance does change consistently in anticipation of that future image." "Incredibly, the blue graph shows that before a calm picture, the anticipation is calm, but before an emotional picture is shown, the red trace shows that the anticipation is emotional too." "How can it possibly be that there's a difference in your anticipation for one thing that you haven't seen as opposed to another thing that you haven't seen?" "Well, that's the question." "We know that the laws of classical mechanics and quantum mechanics are time symmetric, which means that there is..." "The direction of time for elementary particles" "So you can then ask the question, what would happen in the case of consciousness?" "Since we don't really understand consciousness very well, could it reach into this domain where time symmetry rules, which is fundamental physics?" "So here's a moment of a stimulus occurring." "The time symmetry would predict that whatever is occurring to the right side should be symmetric to some extent on the left." "If time symmetry really does affect our experience of reality, then Dean might have provided an explanation for exceptional pilots." "Though not everyone is happy with the idea." "As an aviator, I can't predict the future." "I can't know with 100% certainty where his aircraft is going to be, but based on my ability to understand orientation of objects in three dimensions and my ability and the training I've received," "I can get a good idea - project three to five seconds down the road where his aircraft is going to be." "You can make an educated projection or prediction about what is happening in a few seconds but you can never know with 100% certainty." "We have access to our future, at least to the near-term future, and by having access" "I mean that we are getting information from our future and it influences our present." "You're driving along the highway and if you get a bad feeling, you probably ought to pay attention to it cos maybe the bad feeling is relating to an event which is about to occur." "And if you make the wrong decision on the highway you could end up dead." "If you really are trying to make better decisions, then our final advice is this." "Be aware of your potential for manipulation." "Realise that you post-rationalise your inconvenient bad decisions." "And finally, recognise that whatever intuition is, it shouldn't be ignored, because it might just give you the edge." "If you'd like even more information about how to make better decisions or would like to download this week's video podcast, visit our website " "Now it's time for you to make a decision - what are you going to watch next?" "Good luck."