Interview with Cornell University Professor Emeritus Dr. Daryl Bem looks at the reaction to his groundbreaking parapsychology experiments.

 

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with noted psychology professor Dr. Daryl Bem. During the interview Bem discusses the reaction to his research among parapsychology opponents:

Alex Tsakiris: What do you think is going to happen with this latest round of debunking? The skeptics have risen up and it seems like a very well-organized, concerted effort to knock down your research. What do you think their game plan is? What do you think is going to happen?

 

Dr. Daryl Bem: Well, I think the flurry of activity in the popular media will just sort of die down. When I look at Google News on it there are still four or five articles that pop up in which it just shows how successful Wiseman is at getting his point of view out. I have been replying to people who’ve asked me to reply to blogs and things of that sort.

Without accusing him of actually being dishonest, he has now published the three studies that he and French and Ritchie tried to get published in several journals that rejected it. I replied with a comment on that. If there’s anything dishonest there, it’s when you publish an article, even if it’s of your own three experiments—they did three experiments that failed trying to replicate one of my experiments—you always have a literature review section where you talk about all the previous research and known research on the topic before you present your own data.

What Wiseman never tells people is in Ritchie, Wiseman and French is that his online registry where he asked everyone to register, first of all he provided a deadline date. I don’t know of any serious researcher working on their own stuff who is going to drop everything and immediately do a replication… anyway, he and Ritchie and French published these three studies. Well, they knew that there were three other studies that had been submitted and completed and two of the three showed statistically significant results replicating my results. But you don’t know that from reading his article. That borders on dishonesty.

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Today we welcome Dr. Daryl Bem to Skeptiko. Dr. Bem is a very highly regarded social psychologist and Professor Emeritus from Cornell who created quite a stir last year with his paper, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect.”

Alex Tsakiris: Dr. Bem, it’s a great pleasure to have you on Skeptiko. Thanks for joining me.

Dr. Daryl Bem: Good to be here.

Alex Tsakiris: So a lot of our audience is going to be familiar with this paper and your work but for those that are not, can you tell us a little bit about it, and in particular, why you published this little package of well-defined psi experiments the way you did?

Dr. Daryl Bem: Okay. The article contains nine different experiments. About half of them are actually replications of the others because I didn’t want to publish something that I’d only one once. I wanted to make sure that at least I could reproduce them again if necessary. As the title of the article suggests, I call it “retroactive causation” or “retroactive influence.” People are more familiar with the phenomenon just under the term, “precognition,” the ability to respond to a future event that could not be anticipated by any normal inferential process that we know of.

So what I did because I wanted to address my fellow academics, my colleagues particularly in social and cognitive psychology, so what I did was look through the literature of social psychology and said, “I would like to take several very familiar phenomena that social psychologists already believe in and show that I can reverse them. That is, instead of presenting the stimuli and then measuring the response, I would reverse them in time and measure the response before I provided the stimuli.”

Alex Tsakiris: Give us an example. Give us one of the examples of one that you did that people will immediately grasp.

Dr. Daryl Bem: Sure. The first one, the easiest to understand, the one that got me on The Colbert Report in fact, was just a reversal of the most well-known affect in psychology generally and that is reinforcement. Namely a rat who will be given two bars to press. It will press the one that he or she has been rewarded for in the past.

So I reversed that by saying, “Can we get the rat—in this case college students—to select the alternative that will be rewarded in the future?” So what I did was I presented on the computer—the entire experiment’s run by computer—there were two curtains, side-by-side on the screen. The participant was told that behind one of the curtains is a picture and behind the other curtain is just a blank wall. And they were to, on each trial—there were 36 trials—they were to select one of the two curtains.

Alex Tsakiris: And it was a picture that these college students wanted to see, right?

Dr. Daryl Bem: Well, yes. We also warned them. In fact, we had to get permission from them to do this. Half of the pictures were erotic pictures, people engaged in non-violent but sexually explicit acts. And so what we did was they would select one of the two curtains. The curtain would open and reveal either a picture or a blank wall. Now, unknown to them at the time although it probably didn’t matter whether we had told them ahead of time or not, there actually was no picture behind either of the two curtains at the point at which they made their decision.

They made their decision and then—and only then—the computer flipped the coin to decide which curtain would have the picture behind it. And also flipped a coin to decide whether it would be an erotic photograph or a neutral photograph, a positive picture without sexual overtones.

So they did that in 36 trials and then we just tested the hypothesis that people would be able to detect the future location of the erotic picture more than 50% of the time, where 50% represents what you would expect by chance since it was like a coin flip. They had one of two curtains to select from. What we found in that particular experiment was that an unselected set of subjects would get the right answer about 53% of the time and those we identify as extroverts, for reasons I won’t go into right now, who would be able to do so 57% of the time.

Alex Tsakiris: Wow. That’s impressive.

Dr. Daryl Bem: That’s one experiment.

Alex Tsakiris: Great. And this paper, as you just mentioned, received a lot of positive media attention. As a matter of fact, you broke through the barrier there that science often doesn’t get through. You were on Comedy Central’s, “The Colbert Report”; you were on a lot of media outlets. What was that whole experience like for you? What have you learned from that?

Dr. Daryl Bem: Well, it took me by surprise. First of all, my article wasn’t published until March and so I didn’t expect anyone to know about it until it actually appeared in the journal. But a blogger for the magazine, Psychology Today, a woman who’s herself a professor, apparently attended a meeting in which one of my former graduate students told her about this. So she blogged about it without ever contacting me and that’s when the media storm hit.

It was picked up first by New Scientist, a weekly publication. They’ve now done three articles on it. Then what I learned is something about how the new media works. It was then picked up by lots and lots of other outlets. ABC News, NBC, and oddly enough, Al Jazeera. I share with Osama Bin Laden the honor of being on Al Jazeera.

I must say, Steve Colbert is, of course, primarily a comedian. The interview with him, while directed toward being humorous, was actually one of the more accurate and sensible interviews of all the ones I held.

Alex Tsakiris: Amazing.

Dr. Daryl Bem: It’s probably because he’s so smart.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, he’s on top of his game pretty well.

Dr. Daryl Bem: Yeah, right.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s talk a little bit about the field of parapsychology. A couple of episodes ago, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Caroline Watt, parapsychology researcher from the University of Edinburgh, former President of the Parapsychology Association. As far as I can tell, a pretty hardcore skeptic. Let me throw someone else in the mix here. Her husband/partner, Dr. Richard Wiseman, another hardcore skeptic who’s very active. We’ve had him on the show a couple of times. Very active in debunking any claims related to parapsychology.

This, to me, seems like a very strange situation where you have these debunkers, arch-skeptics kind of in the same pot with the folks who are trying to do this parapsychology research. What do you make of that? Is that a strange situation? You have a broad base of academic experience. Is this at all unusual?

Dr. Daryl Bem: It’s unusual because it’s a controversial area of research. So I’m not familiar with that kind of operation in virtually any other areas of psychology. We’ve also seen it in non-psychological areas like the claims of cold fusion and things of that sort but it is unusual. We make a distinction between skeptics and what we call the “deniers” so the difference between Agnostics and Atheists and many of the people who identify themselves as skeptics have even said—although not Wiseman—but people like Ray Hyman have actually said that no amount of data can convince them.

Well, that’s not how science works. It seems to me a scientist is almost necessarily an Agnostic about things, which means willing to test and look at the data. I will say about Wiseman, however, that he is probably the smartest and best well-informed of all those who identify themselves as skeptics.

I don’t know quite where to place Caroline Watt. Now she herself in interviews with her said she doesn’t consider herself a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic. She has contributed to the experimental literature. So I don’t know quite where she stands. It might fluctuate with her relationship with Richard.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s probe that just a little bit, as much as we can and as much as it’s relevant to this conversation because, I think as you alluded to, I think it is relevant. I mean, what seems to be lying right beneath the surface here are these really hardcore culture war bordering on religious aspects of this debate. Here we have Caroline Watt, Richard Wiseman, pretty radical Atheists. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about his Edinburgh Secret Society thing that they do but right on the website it says they contact spirits and summon the Devil as part of their show, their thing that they do.

On one hand, I don’t care what people do in their spare time but on the other hand, I think it paints a picture of the kind of person that is very radicalized in one way towards this Atheistic worldview that really represents a very small minority of the overall population. I’ve just got to feel like that weighs heavily on this culture war debate that’s really right beneath this debate on the surface over psi. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Dr. Daryl Bem: Well, that may characterize some people. Interestingly, we have a number of Fundamentalists who actually believe in ESP but believe it is the work of the Devil. So we have some odd believers on the other side, as well. I wouldn’t characterize Wiseman in those terms. As I say, he’s very well-informed. He was trained at Edinburgh in the part of the Psychology Department that is the parapsychology wing. So he knows what he’s doing when he’s trying to replicate. As I say, he’s the smartest of them all. Some of them are truly dumb but he’s not one of them.

Alex Tsakiris: And I don’t claim that he’s not intelligent. We’ve had him on the show a couple of times. I think he’s deceptive.

Dr. Daryl Bem: Yeah. He is.

Alex Tsakiris: I’ve had Rupert Sheldrake on the show and he’s one of the few people who have just come out and flat out said the guy’s deceptive; he’s been deceptive for 10 years; I engaged in an experiment with him and he fudged the data and recast everything. And he did a lot of unethical, very questionable things. So I’m not really putting down his intelligence or his ability. I think he’s a great debunker. I think he’s an irradicalized Atheist and I don’t think most people know that or factor that in. I guess the question is, do you really think that you have a chance of getting a fair shake with these folks?

Dr. Daryl Bem: Well, that’s a funny way to put it. I think they have established their reputations and he’s made a total career out of being a debunker and an extraordinarily successful person at getting public attention to his pronouncements. I take a much more sort of benign psychological view of it. He has a great career going by being a debunker. It wouldn’t match what he had done if he had been one of the regular parapsychologists.

So rather than look for deep hidden motives, I tend to look at the more simple one. He’s extraordinarily successful at being a debunker and he’s more knowledgeable and in some ways more honest than someone like Randi, the magician who offers $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate ESP.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. Well, I think the final chapter in James Randi has been written in this latest legal trouble that he’s gotten into with his life partner where he has clearly broken the law. And Randi has aided him in this really pretty serious identity theft that he’s engaged in for years. So it’s…

Dr. Daryl Bem: I myself am a magician who—in my past. That’s how I got into this field. I had done stage magic, namely mentalism—that is fake ESP—ever since I was in high school. The way I got into this field was the Parapsychological Association asked me to come give my stage performance to their convention because they wanted to be able to protect themselves against people who might enter their labs claiming and knowing how to fake ESP and subvert their research.

So I went and did my performance and I was a skeptic at the time. I didn’t know the literature. Someone there, namely Chuck Honorton, who is now deceased, was setting up a new laboratory at the time. He asked me to come to his laboratory and to examine his experimental methods, both from the point of view of a magician and the point of view of a social psychologist who does live experiments and see if they were air-tight.

I looked at it and in preparation for the visit to his laboratory I started reading the literature. I was struck by how strong it was. I had never seen that. So I have some sympathy for people who aren’t familiar with all the research that’s already gone on.

Anyway, I said to him, “You know, I have one major talent and that’s getting published in mainstream psychological journals. If you get positive results with this technique, then I’ll try to get them published in a mainstream APA journal.” And we did. He got positive results and we wrote it up and in 1994 we published in The Psychological Bulletin, which is a highly regarded APA journal. The report of those studies was in telepathy.

So then I thought, ‘You know, I’d like to gather my own data.’ These were not my data, although I believed them, so that’s when I started my lab. So I’ve only been in this for a few years. My reputation over the last 40 years has been in just mainstream social psychology.

That is why I deliberately designed these studies to first of all use a familiar phenomenon to psychologists but also to be very, very simple in conceptualization, to be attributable to analyze statistically, and to be able to use just college students as the participants. The whole reason for all of that is I wanted to encourage my fellow psychologists to replicate them because everything rests upon replication.

That, to go back to your original question of why did I make these packets available, anyone who wants to replicate them can write me and I will give them access to a complete instruction manual, all the software that runs the experiment, including the software that collects and analyzes the data. That was all deliberate. That was all designed from day one to encourage other people to try to replicate them.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s great. That’s also interesting how you came to the field and the background that you bring in terms of being a mainstream psychology researcher.

You know, I’ve had a chance a couple of times to interview Dean Radin. I’ve really appreciated his perspective on parapsychology, having been at it for a number of years. But I always asked him the question that was on my mind, “Hey, why are you focused on doing these experiments with general population college students or people who walk in off the street? Why not the superstars?”

He gave what I thought was a very good answer. He said, “Look, we have a pretty good body of research that establishes that this is real phenomena. What we need to do is move past that and maybe understand what aspect of our ordinary experience overlaps with that.”

I thought that was a pretty good answer at the time but I go back and I wonder when I look at the storm of controversy that this creates, your publication creates, are we really there yet? Are we at the point where we can say, “Okay, we’re past establishing it. Let’s just see how it works in the general population.” Or should we be studying the superstars to better firmly and finally establish that this does happen, at least in some people sometimes?

Dr. Daryl Bem: I have a similar but not identical answer to that. I do think we in the field are beyond the point of just trying to prove its existence. The time has come to really bore down into what are its characteristics, how does it work, can we possibly come up with a mechanism to explain it? And so I agree with that part of it.

But I tend to agree with people who raise the issue, why work with unselected students? Ed May, a physicist who’s in this field, has often said, “You know, if you want to study high jumping you don’t go out onto the street and ask random people to high jump for you. What you do is you find the world’s best high jumpers and study them because that is the way to understand what it’s about.”

And I agree with that. The reason I use unselected college students is because I want to encourage other people to replicate it. If I were just using the top 1% of psi-talented people in the country, my colleagues in mainstream psychology would not be able to try to replicate it. So who’s the population most accessible to my colleagues? And that’s, as we often joke, it’s white male sophomores taking Psych 101. [Laughs]

So I had a tactical or strategic reason for doing that. It’s the easiest thing to do and I wanted purposely to do the easiest thing. But I also agree with Ed May. I think we learn more actually by studying the truly talented people. Dean Radin himself studies Zen Buddhists, Buddhist Masters, Zen Masters. So when he wants to really show something he uses people who have had 25 or 30 years of deep religious training in meditation and psi-related phenomena.

Alex Tsakiris: Dr. Bem, what do you tell people that come up to you—and I’m sure this happens all the time—and tell you about their precognitive experiences? Their dreams, their premonitions, the déjà vu experiences they’ve had? What do you tell them when they say, “Is this real? What’s happening to me?”

Dr. Daryl Bem: Okay. I actually get four or five emails every day from people telling me about this.

Alex Tsakiris: Do you really? [Laughs] Good for you.

Dr. Daryl Bem: And many of them say to me, “You know, I’m also gay. It was easier to come out to my family as gay than it is to tell them that I’ve had these precognitive experiences because they’ll think I’m crazy.” And so there are a whole bunch of people who write me and are sort of, to use the same phrase, in the closet about their experiences on this.

When I was a complete skeptic, way back before I got involved in all of this, I would be able to point to the hundreds of ways that we social and cognitive psychologists have learned that people can be misled by faulty memories, by not being able to evaluate the frequency of coincidences and things of that sort. And so I’d sort of pooh-pooh what they would say.

Now I say, “Well, we have good laboratory evidence, strong laboratory evidence that these things actually occur and it’s impossible after the fact for me to prove that you really did experience something quite extraordinary or not. But it’s certainly a possibility.”

And then I recommend two books to them to read. One of them, for people who are really interested in seeing the whole field is Dean Radin’s own book called, Entangled Minds, which actually attempts to use quantum mechanics in a way that people can understand to see if that may contain the physics that would help us explain how ESP works.

The second book I suggest to them is by Larry Dossey, who is actually an M.D. who works on alternative methods of healing, who has written a book called, The Science of Premonitions, and it’s very good. It’s accurate but it’s a nice combination of anecdotes of the kind that people report to me and the science that we know about with regard to premonitions, including lots and lots of things that occurred around 9/11. People appear to have had foreknowledge of the 9/11 incidents.

So I no longer pooh-pooh these people and in recommending these books it first of all tells people they’re not alone and also gives them the scientific background. The people who believe too quickly I then give them a standard lecture on the way in which our minds mislead us about things.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, and I think that’s valid to throw that in the mix. But I have to say in having researched this as much or as little as I have over the last few years, that seems to me to be often overblown and exaggerated. It’s kind of like when you were alluding to the story of the magician and we need to bring a magician into the lab to control these experiments. It always seemed like a little bit over-the-top in terms of a good scientist automatically develops controls that are pretty darned tight. They might make mistakes now and then but I’ve got to believe that they’re on top of their game.

Dr. Daryl Bem: I agree with you on that. In fact, it’s been my experience that parapsychologists are actually methodologists than most of the people I know in psychology generally. They know about things that psychologists themselves rarely have to think about.

So in my paper I go into a detailed discussion of the difference between different kinds of random number generators to choose what the event will be that the person’s trying to predict. Most psychologists have never heard of the distinction between those two that I know of and just the details of the methodology.

The journals in parapsychology are among the very few that openly welcome and promise to publish negative results, as well. So you don’t have the file drawer problem nearly as severely because they will do that. I’ve been the editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a section editor on that in the past, and now I’m an associate editor on the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which publishes a lot of the ESP stuff. We’re just as rigorous in our evaluation of the experimental controls. The reason that I was invited was that followed that talk about magic and warning about them, his laboratory was fooled by Randi.

Alex Tsakiris: But I think when you really look at the history of what happened there, it’s another Randi con job. They really weren’t fooled anywhere near to the extent that he portrayed. Isn’t that correct?

Dr. Daryl Bem: Yes, yes. But we ourselves were critical of that particular lab. We thought they weren’t as careful as they should have been. But they never published anything based on the phony guys who had been planted there. So that’s true. But what I was trying to say is this was the era when the fear of God had been put into some of the parapsychologists.

Alex Tsakiris: By the old trickster himself, James Randi. Dr. Bem, what do you think is going to happen with this latest round of debunking that the skeptics have risen up and it seems like a very well-organized, concerted effort to knock down your research. What do you think is going to happen? What do you think is their game plan?

I can see part of the game plan where it was Wiseman originally published some rather kind of obscure objections that you pretty quickly knocked down. Then he wanted a very controlled—you had to file for replication with him to make sure that there weren’t any file drawer problems that you talked about. What do you think the game plan is and how do you think it’s eventually going to play out in terms of this debunking effort?

Dr. Daryl Bem: Well, I think the flurry of activity in the popular media will just sort of die down. When I look at Google News on it there are still four or five articles that pop up in which it just shows how successful Wiseman is at getting his point of view out. I have been replying to people who’ve asked me to reply to blogs and things of that sort.

Without accusing him of actually being dishonest, he has now published the three studies that he and French and Ritchie tried to get published in several journals that rejected it. I replied with a comment on that. If there’s anything dishonest there, it’s when you publish an article, even if it’s of your own three experiments—they did three experiments that failed trying to replicate one of my experiments—you always have a literature review section where you talk about all the previous research and known research on the topic before you present your own data.

What Wiseman never tells people is in Ritchie, Wiseman and French, the thing they published, their three failures, is that his online registry where he asked everyone to register, first of all he provided a deadline date. To be included in that you had to have completed it by December 1st. Well, that’s six months after my article appeared. I don’t know of any serious researcher working on their own stuff who is going to drop everything and immediately do a replication.

Alex Tsakiris: And why would there need to be that kind of deadline to begin with? I mean, it’s completely contrived to work only in support of his effort.

Dr. Daryl Bem: Unless he just underestimated or overestimated how many people were going to drop everything and try to replicate it. Anyway, he and Ritchie and French published these three studies. Well, they knew that there were three other studies that had been submitted and completed and two of the three showed statistically significant results replicating my results. But you don’t know that from reading his article. That borders on dishonesty.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. What do you think the future holds for this research? Do you think there will be other attempts to replicate it? Will this…

Dr. Daryl Bem: Oh, yeah. There are some. There are, already ongoing. I think it will probably settle down. There won’t be this immediate thing and at some point there will be enough studies that we could actually begin to figure out exactly what’s causing replication successes and what causes replication failures. One of the points I make in my commentary and I really believe is I think the experimenters’ attitudes and expectations about the effect affect the results.

Alex Tsakiris: I’m sorry but that experimenter affect is an idea that’s 1) been floating around there experimentally for a while, and 2) gosh, how could it not be a factor given what we already know about psi. So I think that’s kind of interesting.

Dr. Daryl Bem: Yeah.  Skeptics are quick to jump on it and say, “Well then what you’re saying is no one else who doesn’t believe it already can replicate it.” And that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that we need to incorporate the experimenters’ attitudes and expectations as variables in our attempts to replicate.

The two other independent replications that are in his registry were done by people who are at least neutral or believers that psi exists. And Ritchie and French and Wiseman are all well-known skeptics and they got no results.

The real irony is that Wiseman himself was in an experiment, as you know probably from the Caroline Watts interview, with Marilyn Schlitz. Marilyn Schlitz is someone who is first of all a very talented experimenter and often gets very good, positive results in psi experiments and she’s President at the Noetic Institute. She and Richard Wiseman collaborated on three studies of a psi effect in which they used the same subjects. They did it in the same laboratory—in fact, it was Wiseman’s own laboratory for two of them—and randomly assigned themselves to different sessions.

Marilyn got two positive results and Wiseman never did. So we have a beautiful demonstration right there of when a skeptic and a proponent of psi get together and do an experiment, the proponent gets positive results and the skeptic does not.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, and don’t you think that would fit into this broader picture that we’re getting of consciousness beyond brain activity, consciousness being larger than just what’s inside our brain? The trend line definitely seems to be in that direction, in this interconnected universe that we live in why would we not expect those kinds of effects to happen to begin with?

So it always seems kind of disingenuous when skeptics just want to roll their eyes and laugh and say, “Experimenter Effect?” It’s like how could we not have an Experimenter Effect if there is in fact an effect going on at all?”

Dr. Daryl Bem: Yeah. Well. The fact that we see the Experimenter Effect even back in the ‘60s when this was being investigated so intensively, you could lead experimenters to believe, for example, that certain rats had been bred to be brighter than other rats even though they were just randomly picked. The experimenters who expected the rats to run the maze faster did so.

So if you can find Experimenter Effects there it’s hardly a novelty that we can find it in an area like psi. But I agree with you. It does say something about nonlocal knowledge, the non-locality of our own bodies and minds.

Alex Tsakiris: Dr. Bem, for those folks who want to learn more about your research and maybe fill up your inbox more with their stories of precognition and other accounts, how can they learn more about your work? Tell us a little bit about what’s coming up for you, particularly with this subject. How much do you plan on staying involved with it and how much would you like to move on to other work?

Dr. Daryl Bem: I’ve now retired. I’m Professor Emeritus, as you said, and so I’m probably going to close my actual laboratory, which I’m still running, at the end of this semester. That’s my current plan. Then probably investigate the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful replicators because that is an area of interest to me. I have a background in personality psychology, as well. So I’m interested in that because I’m interested in being able to show stronger replication effects. What I’ve been doing in my lab since the publication is trying to take a couple of the experiments and see if I can’t make them stronger. The stronger the effect, the easier it would be for other people to find.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, right. How ironic that would be, since one of the strategies of the debunkers has long been to psychologize the phenomena and say, “We don’t need to study the phenomena. We need to study these weird people who report and believe these weird things.” Wouldn’t it be ironic if it turns out we need to look at the beliefs and psychology of the experimenters and why they don’t believe and why they don’t get these effects.

Dr. Daryl Bem: And the other thing that’s funny is you know they’re always hammering at us about the File Drawer Effect, namely that we only know about the positive studies. But it turns out they themselves have a File Drawer Effect. They suppress positive findings. So the file drawer works both ways.

Alex Tsakiris:   Right, and in this case it’s much more significant really if you hide a positive result. It potentially could be much more significant. I guess it would really just depend on the result so there’s really probably no inherent advantage to—suppression is suppression, right?

Dr. Daryl Bem: Yeah.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, Dr. Bem, it’s been a great pleasure having you on the show. Thanks so much and the best of luck with all your future work.

Dr. Daryl Bem: Thank you.