QI

Good evening, welcome to QI.

Pull up a pew and assemble your amazeballs

because tonight's show is absolutely phenomenal.

Our guests tonight are the puzzling Cariad Lloyd...

...the perplexing Paul Sinha...

...the preternatural Josh Widdicombe...

...and the Pope Lick Monster, Alan Davies.

So, can anybody tell me anything about the Pope Lick Monster?

Well, I deny everything, for a start.

And the Pope started it. No, no...

It is part man, part goat, part sheep, and it supposedly lived...

And part Catholic?

Part Catholic. It supposedly lives beneath a railway bridge

over Pope Lick Creek in Louisville, Kentucky. Oh.

It lures people to their death by hypnosis.

Come with me, yes, I have cake, come this way.

Is that how you get your ladies?

It could work.

Our guests' buzzers are a peculiar panoply of the paranormal.

Cariad goes...

It's a show about phenomena.

Yeah, things are going to get weird.

Paul goes...

Josh goes...

And Alan goes...

Actually frightened me.

First of all, we're going to probe your psyches.

What do you see here?

That's my mum that didn't love me.

They're always about the mother.

Yeah, that's my dad that didn't love me, and that one's Alan Davies.

That third one was a bit of loo role I flushed away this morning.

That really did not take long, did it?

Number three is when smoked salmon goes bad.

Yes, it does look a bit like that, doesn't it?

So, what are these called?

Rorschach tests.

They're the Rorschach tests, named after Hermann Rorschach,

or just ink blots, we could just call them,

and he published his first ink blots in 1921... Whoa! Wow!

Why did no-one talk about how hot Rorschach is? I'm sorry...

That is one of those ones on the X Factor, he's not good enough

on his own, but they'll put him in a group.

He's so hot, I'm sorry. Yeah, he is a very good-looking fellow. Gosh.

He was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst... Sure...

...and he was looking for a way in which you could diagnose

schizophrenics, but, in fact, do we think the ink blots worked?

No, isn't that the thing, they proved that they didn't really...?

They didn't do what they were looking for,

which was a substantive test to see... analysing different illnesses,

so on, but it did allow people sometimes to tap

into the unconscious, so, sometimes it makes people talk

about things that they wouldn't ordinarily talk about.

As a GP, it's quite useful to get rid of a patient that you wanted

to get rid of. If they just come in for a cough or a cold,

"Does this remind you of your dead mother?"

Is that how you get them out? Exactly.

I would have thought it might make you stay a bit longer, I'd be like,

"Oh, Dr Sinha's ready to chat, let's go!"

If Dr Sinha looked anything like Rorschach, then you'd be...

Yeah, then I would be, and I'd have to get out.

The fact is that we do have a tendency to look at images

and try and make them into something, it is something

called pareidolia, and it's the human tendency to see

images where maybe they don't exist.

We want it to make some kind of sense.

What he was looking for was a way to look for depression

or anxiety disorders, violent criminal tendencies,

and that absolutely does not work for, but it works occasionally

to unlock things that people can't articulate,

that they do want to try and talk about.

Does anybody know where the word "shrink" comes from,

which we sometimes use, in terms of psychiatrist?

Is it about shrinking your brain?

Well, it's from a... There's a sort of pseudoscience

called phrenology... Yeah... Ooh...

And phrenologists used to claim that the shape of the skull

indicated the personality, and they could help you shrink

the undesirable qualities, is what they were looking for.

Let's have a look at the first three ink blots that we had up,

and let's see what everybody makes of them. Number one,

what do you see? It looks a bit like a train line,

that's what I'm thinking. A train line? Like train tracks.

Well, where they've entered the toilets, I don't know what that...

What I can actually see there... Yes?

Oh, God, I hope... Imagine if I found out I'm a murderer

through this, it's going to be really disappointing.

Imagine you found out? You'd have to have killed someone to...

The thing is, that isn't how it works.

However, it may work in terms of you being able to articulate something

that previously you haven't been able to.

So let's have that articulation.

Genuinely what I can see... Yep? ..Is I think it looks like a cat,

in that you've got those two whiskers, and then it looks

like a bit of a cat's face below it. Right.

And then you've... Then the rest of it doesn't look like a cat.

It could be a cat if it's roadkill.

Yeah, Josh, yeah, that's murderer, if you see a cat.

It's called murderer. Yeah.

Well, it is known as the sex card.

It has the most reported sexual answers. Oh. Oh, dear.

But also lots of people see it as an animal skin or a rug,

that's extremely common.

So, let's have a look at number two, Cariad?

I can see two girls looking at each other.

Well, it is sometimes referred to as the mother card.

Women and children are often seen in that blot.

I think it looks like two people.

It's two rabbits yelling at each other. Yeah.

Number three, common responses to this blot,

what does anybody else think?

It's surely the rear view of two gorillas high-fiving each other.

Oh, yeah!

This might come back badly on my psychology,

but can anyone else see, like, a screaming rabbit?

No, but I can hear one.

The Silence Of The Rabbits, the unsuccessful working title.

Apparently this card can also induce a variety of sexual responses.

Oh, there you go. As I said, can anyone else...?

A silently screaming rabbit. We know a lot about you, Josh.

They did do Rorschach tests on senior Nazis at Nuremberg

and they asked experts to pick out the war criminals

and it is impossible to do so.

I love the way they thought, "These Nazi war criminals,

"what we need to check if they're bad guys..." Yes.

If they come in dressed up as a Nazi...

...there's your first clue. Game over, yeah.

Let's just check, we will make sure than this bit of ink.

Yeah, give him his fair dues.

Show him the ink first before you judge him.

Let's just see.

The Rorschach test has long been used as a personality test,

but I don't know what people see in it.

Where's the weirdest place to feel another person?

Loughborough? Yeah! Loughborough's good. I don't know.

I was going to say Salford, I don't know why!

Bognor Regis.

Is it on your body? Does it begin with a P?

Is it perineum? Oh!

No, but I like your workings.

I love that you didn't wait for the answer to any of those questions.

We really saw the thought process, the whole way through.

From a doctor's point of view, it's probably the middle

of your gut, because that would suggest that you've gone too far.

Oh...

One way or the other, you've gone too far. That's very unpleasant.

Can you go in both ends? Like, you know when you're building a...

Oh, like when they met at the Channel Tunnel halfway?

When you... Exactly!

And when you're on the beach and you're building a sand castle

and you put a tunnel in.

Where would you meet in the body if you did that?

That's a curious question.

If two people met, hand-in-hand, in the middle of me...

Yeah?

...would I definitely have to die?

Or could I survive that?

I don't know, but your GP would definitely be struck off.

OK, so, the weirdest place to feel another person,

for example, would be on Mount Everest or on an expedition.

It's something called Third Man Syndrome and it is the sensation

of the presence of an extra, unseen person.

So, the weirdest place you might feel another person

is when there's actually nobody there.

It happens in extreme situations.

The most vivid are experienced by adventurers.

In 1933, there was a solo attempt to climb Everest by a British

explorer called Frank Smythe, and he got within 1,000ft

of the top and he had the strongest sensation

that somebody was with him, so strong that he broke off a piece of,

I don't know, Kendal Mint Cake, whatever it was, and he handed it,

or tried to hand it, to this other person.

Probably the bloke holding the camera.

But Ernest Shackleton reported exactly the same sensation

in his book, South. That's really weird.

He says, "During that long and racking march of 36 hours

"over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,

"it seemed to me often that we were four and not three."

So, there was a sensation of there being somebody else along.

And I don't know if you know TS Eliot's poem The Wasteland,

it's in there, it's inspired by Shackleton's experience.

That's Gandalf. Shaft!

It did feel a bit karaoke, that, didn't it?

Yeah, yeah. TS Eliot karaoke. I want to do it.

So, why do you think it might be?

Why? Because of ghosts.

Oh, there's a bloke on Everest who just keeps turning up.

No, it's possibly a coping mechanism of the brain to provide comfort.

Or ghosts.

Or it's ghosts.

But some people think that's why we think there are guardian angels,

why some people have imaginary friends,

that it's to do with a sort of coping mechanism.

The other suggestion is that there's a certain swelling

in certain areas of the brain and that could trigger hallucinations.

If you have the Third Man Syndrome,

it doesn't seem to cause you any difficulties later on,

although they do think there have been some accidents

mountaineering which we might blame on the Third Man Syndrome.

Guys going, "Come this way, come this way."