The Meaning of the Mirror Worlds Research

At an online conference on the Theories of Psi in March of 2022, I first met professor Russell Gruber.

As we were chit chatting, I learned that he had done a great deal of research into psychic ability over the years, but that he hadn’t published it and barely anyone knew about it. Writing about psi research is what I do, so after a few discussions we agreed that I would write an article about his 18 years of psi research conducted at the University of Eastern Illinois.

You can find the article here: https://paranormaldailynews.com/skeptics-psychic-psi-missing/1394/

The Mirror Worlds research is so named because the experiments uncover a strong correlation between what people believe, how they act, and their performance on psychic tasks. On a graph, you can see quite plainly that there are people who exceed chance results at a psychic task, but also that there are people who exceed chance results by being unsuccessful at the same task. If you look at this on a bar graph, these two results mirror each other in opposite directions.

The research is valuable to parapsychology because it strongly validates some properties of psychic ability known to other researchers, but not as fully explored.

Superpsi or telepathy?

Telepathy, for example, has been theorized to be either clairvoyance or precognition. This is the origin problem of not knowing where psi information comes from because our consciousness is a kind of black box in that it’s impossible to objectively observe what’s happening. Psychic ability is not a physical process, so there is nothing to measure or watch as it happens. What that means is that we’re not sure what’s actually happening with telepathy and mediumship. How are people getting the information? We don’t know. It could be coming from where people think it’s coming from, but it could also be some combination of clairvoyance and precognition.

(I’ve never been a fan of the SuperPsi or precognition hypothesis. While technically feasible, it doesn’t match up well with human experience. Superpsi and precognition seem to be “taking the long way” to getting the answer.)

In one of the Mirror Worlds studies, Gruber had the senders intentionally deceive the receiver by telepathically sending the wrong answer. If the superpsi or precognition hypothesis were true, then this should not affect the choice of the receiver, as the senders would be bypassed in favor of the receiver getting the answer directly through clairvoyance or precognition.

But that’s not what happened. The receiver consistently got the wrong answers that the senders were sending and not the correct answer. This strongly supports the hypothesis that telepathy is what was actually happening in the experiments and not clairvoyance or precognition.

People Are Psychic, But in Different Ways

Image: Canva

Gruber’s research made heavy use of the mirror worlds effect, which validated a known testing condition also known as the Differential Effect, that was almost unknown in the field. If you gather enough information about the personalities and beliefs of participants, you can often find that the data divides according to various criteria, the strongest of which is the belief or lack of belief in, psychic ability. That division is a very strong indicator that you’re not getting chance results.

The idea that test results can be affected by belief suggests something important: It leads to a more fluid idea of objective reality. We are all somewhat blinded by our beliefs , as this research shows, and at some deeper level of our subconscious we know the outcome of various paths we’re about to take. Our beliefs will cause us to choose the outcome that matches those beliefs most closely, whether it is what we consciously want to achieve or not. This can be somewhat difficult to wrap your head around, but everyday examples abound, particularly in romance where the effects of deeply held beliefs are particularly obvious.

For example, there are always those men and women who find themselves in toxic relationships over and over again, even if they aren’t particularly toxic themselves. A subconscious belief about their own self worth is causing them to not only ignore warning signs, but also to actively, psychically choose to bond with people who are toxic. Meanwhile, other people seem to be able to consistently avoid that type of person.

The Mirror World studies expose one of the mechanisms responsible for consistently making choices which are not in line with what a person might consciously want.

What this means for Psi Research: Our Subconscious Is In Control

How we perform at psychic tasks is an indication of what is coming from our subconscious and it is very important to be aware of this because it has a huge effect on what we experience. Psychic ability is also intuition. It’s our ability to make the right decisions with limited information. What we subconsciously believe affects our ability to make those decisions.

This can either be an accumulation of small decisions or a few larger ones. This can lead to very negative or positive outcomes generally, as we might miss clues that something is wrong and end up in a bad situation or instinctively recognize a hidden opportunity and become quite successful. What this research is showing us is that those outcomes don’t come from nowhere. Our subconscious is constantly nudging us based on our deepest beliefs.

Some people are lucky in love, or lucky in financial stability, or lucky in staying healthy. They may not be lucky in any of them or only lucky in one or two of them. This luck appears to be the result of subconscious beliefs driving us in certain directions.

To sum it up, I think that we all need to be aware that our largely ignored subconscious is playing a much larger role in our lives than we imagine. What we consciously desire can be sabotaged by our subconscious, beyond our conscious ability to access it.

It’s a much bigger deal than we give it credit for.

What We Know About Psychic Ability

A Sad State of Affairs

I used to be in the New Age Movement — back in the day. I taught myself psychic healing and taught others how to do it, although I quickly realized that I did not know much about it. Unlike medicine, there isn’t a wealth of scientific information to draw on. In fact, at the time, there was next to none. So I was flying blind. Because of the ubiquitous presence of bad skepticism, I had no idea that there was any science behind psychic ability at all.

Psychic Ability

It’s been like that for psychic mediums, remote viewers, dowsers and pretty much anyone else pushing the limits of their psychic ability. There is a lot that people don’t know and that has been a big problem. It has opened the door to all sorts of speculation by people who have asserted that they understood THE TRUTH. Countless books have been written offering someone’s version of what reality is and those range from rejecting the existence of psychic ability, to viewing it as a gift of God to the work of the Devil.

The problem with all of these random theories, is that they have no explanatory power. These theories tell you nothing about how psychic ability functions or why. They are useless for going forward because they have no knowledge base to build upon.

The Actual Experts

Parapsychologists; those scientists who do scientific experiments and publish papers in journals while carefully building a body of knowledge, have learned a great deal about psychic ability. Their theories come from a solid body of knowledge based on investigations and published experiments.

The most popular theory among parapsychologists; (i.e. the one with the most explanatory power), is that psychic ability is fundamentally a subconscious ability. The subconscious operates with full psychic functioning, and it’s always “on.” We access this psychic information by accessing the subconscious. To get to it, we have to navigate deeper parts of our personalities that we’re not normally aware of. This isn’t normally an easy thing to do and it may open up hidden fears and buried memories, which are also in the subconscious.

The theory speculates that we normally use our ordinary senses to accomplish our goals and it’s only when we enter into an ambiguous situation that cannot be resolved by our other senses that our psychic ability will kick in. So if we’re still trying to accomplish something with our other senses, we’re not likely to utilize our psychic ability.

My Own Thoughts On Psychic Ability

I have theorized that based on some studies, that psychic ability tends to be stronger based on need, and somehow the subconscious knows what that is. The more you need your psychic ability, -combined with a realization that you’re not going to get the help you want any other way,- the more likely you are to access it.

I have also theorized that psychic ability tends to be emotionally based. (This ties into need.) Reading other people’s emotional state, even when they’re not physically present, is what psychic ability is “tuned” for. Especially when people are deliberately hiding their emotions. I think that it’s the thing that it does best.

Psychic Ability Explained?

So how does this explain anything? Well, for starters it answers the question of why we don’t use psychic ability all the time. Our other senses can and do handle our day to day functioning just fine. It explains that a person’s ability to tolerate ambiguity will affect their psychic functioning. People who can stop thinking, stop trying and just relax and let things be, will do better psychically than people who keep hammering away and never give up.

This also describes the creative process, so we would therefore expect people who are better at creative tasks and holistic thinking to perform better at psychic tasks (which require entering into an open, receptive state of mind) than people who excel at linear thinking. It doesn’t take much of a leap to realize that the latter more or less describes skeptics.

The Trouble With Skeptics

The skeptics, who pride themselves on their linear thinking, are revealed to be lacking in the qualities that would make them good at psychic ability. A lack of ability to enter into a receptive state of mind means that they are most likely not good holistic thinkers; this would explain why they have trouble making the necessary connections to understand psychic ability. Another aspect of this is that the more linear your thinking is, the more trouble you have changing your mind.

We would expect psychic people to be inclined towards holistic thinking, to be creative in other areas and to have personalities that capable of having quiet moments and self reflection. This does, in fact, describe psychic people as a group quite well. It’s also been shown that creative people do better than others at psychic tasks.

That’s what explanatory power is. The theory matches what is observed and explains it, and also provides a map towards future knowledge.

The Psychic Process

The psychic process is challenging to describe because it occurs solely within a person’s mind, where it cannot be directly observed by anyone else. Psychic information, because of how it’s obtained, is difficult to distinguish from one’s own thoughts.

To sift through one’s own thoughts, one must first have strong inner awareness to know what one’s own thoughts look like and from there discern what psychic information personally looks and feels like. All of this must occur without trying to hard, which will disrupt the process. It’s a delicate balance that requires discipline, good intellectual awareness and strong holistic thinking skills. Not everyone is capable of this. So when researchers test for psychic ability they should expect to see some people do far better than others. In the scientific lingo, they would not expect to see homogeneous results. (Yes, this is also confirmed in scientific testing.)

Suspension of ordinary thought processes is so crucial to the psychic process that the Ganzfeld experiment is constructed around it. Ordinary sensory input is reduced to the absolute minimum. Unsurprisingly, this experiment also yields some of the most reliable results.

How This Relates To Physics

Of course, eventually we get around to the question of what the mechanism is. How does it work? And that is a damned good question. Psychic ability does not rely on sending or receiving signals. All forms of electromagnetic waves have been ruled out, even including ELF waves. (That is a story for another time.) In order to understand it at all, we need to look at reality differently, and here is where quantum physics comes in.

The question lands us smack in the middle of the mother of all scientific debates of our time: Is the universe fundamentally material, like a giant clock? Or is it fundamentally like a giant mind? If we look at the universe as material, then psychic ability is impossible, end of story. But it plainly IS possible, so that avenue does not match the evidence and we can safely dismiss it. So we conclude that the universe is like a giant mind and consciousness is therefore fundamental to the universe. Consciousness shapes our reality.

Time and Space Reality

Moving on from there, time and space are not absolutes. They utterly relational to one another, (You measure time with distance and without time you are everywhere at once and distance doesn’t exist.) which is why the term “spacetime” was coined. If consciousness is fundamental to reality, -and there are good arguments for this- then the mind has the ability to transcend this aspect of reality. Thoughts do not travel from one person to the other because their minds were never separate in the first place. With telepathy, we’re only making particular connections stronger and bringing them into conscious awareness through our own intent. They were already there.

This is what entanglement shows us: a universe beyond space and time. Bell’s Inequality Theorem states that QM only works if the universe is entangled. A lot of people miss the implications here and act as though entanglement was just another feature of QM instead of realizing that it’s showing us something fundamental about reality.

Space and time must be something created by a more fundamental reality; they cannot be fundamental themselves. If photons can entangle and behave as though space and time don’t exist, then space and time can be treated as though they don’t exist. That’s why psychic ability operates as though it’s time and space independent. Because it is. It seems spooky and weird and in defiance of physics only if you’re stuck in a Newtonian materialist view of the world. Once you understand the implications of quantum physics, and you view consciousness as fundamental to reality, psychic ability is not only possible, but predictable.

Sources:

The theory is called “First Sight” by psychologist Jim Carpenter: Here is a PDF four page description: http://www.drjimcarpenter.com/about/documents/FirstSightformindfield.pdf

Theory of need is based on these sources (and others) because of their extremely high success rate: A healing study by William Bengston with a cure rate of a whopping 87.9%. https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/gtpp/Documents/jse_14_3_bengston.pdf

Neuroscientist Diane Powell, who investigated telepathy in autistic children with a mind blowing success rate of over 99% You can read the article here: https://drdianehennacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/ES_Issue23Article.pdf

The sources for a link between consciousness and physics are too numerous to list.

The Staring Studies: You Really are Being Watched from Behind

Have you ever had that feeling of being watched? In the late 90s, biologist Rupert Sheldrake searched for a psi experiment that was simple enough to be carried out at high school level. His thinking was that such an experiment could introduce young adults to the concept of psi research and teach them a little science along the way. It would be an easy way to show that psi was real. So the ‘being watched’ experiment was evolved.

The Staring Studies Are Simple

What he came up with was a staring experiment. It’s not only a simple concept, but the execution of the experiment is also straightforward. You have one person designated as the starer and another person designated as the subject who cannot see the starer. The starer then randomly stares or doesn’t stare at the subject and the subject records whether they thought they were being stared at. The subjects are given from 10 to 20 seconds to make up their minds.

If you do this enough, you find that people correctly guess that they are being watched or stared at, at much better than chance levels. In some experiments, it was as much as 10% better, and in an Internet experiment, it was only about 3%. (The advantage of an Internet experiment is that you can do a lot more trials.) It’s not something that people get right all the time, but it is definitely a testable effect.

It’s like that in most psi experiments and why statistics are necessary most of the time to discover an effect. If psychic ability was so easily replicable that we didn’t need statistics, we wouldn’t have the present controversy. Nevertheless, it was a successful experiment by any sane standard.

The Devil is in the Details

Even with a simple experiment like this one, the devil is always in the details. You begin staring studies research by surveying general populations to determine whether it’s even a thing. Sheldrake referred to three different surveys: (Braud, Shafer & Andrews, 1990; Sheldrake, 1994; Cottrell, Winer & Smith, 1996) to show that a large number of people, 70-97% of the population, claim to have experienced psychically knowing that they were being watched or stared at. This alone made it worth checking out.

There are several ways to conduct this experiment, depending on budget. You can do it via CCTV, where the starer does their work via a live feed from the participant. Therefore, you can measure galvanic skin response and do away with participant reporting, or do it on the cheap and have the starer and the participants in the same room and just make sure that the participants keep their backs turned and self report. Try blindfolding the participants, or you can do a combination of the above, depending on how strict you want the experimental controls to be.

It’s useful to do staring studies several different ways, because this tells you if the extra controls are necessary. If, for example, you do one experiment with CCTV and another experiment where people just have their backs turned and the results from the two experiments are similar, then it’s highly likely that the additional step of using CCTV was unnecessary. (That’s what happened, by the way. The CCTV experiments did not have results much different from the less well controlled experiments.)

Controls and Potential Problems

Experimenting with controls is also easy. A group of people have their backs turned and are never stared at. (The controls guess at rates that are strictly at chance levels.) Still, even in something as simple as staring studies there are a number of things to watch out for. Someone may try to peek. Or they might hear something from the starer that cues them. If so, this problem would show up in the control experiments as well, which it didn’t.

Peeking requires a turning of the head. People cannot see directly behind them, even with peripheral vision, so this would be an obvious move that would alert the experimenter to the problem. If you think hearing is the problem, you can also use a video feed and stare from another room.

A more difficult possibility is when feedback is given, participants might pick up on subtle sensory cues and get better at guessing when they’re stared at. Then there is the possibility of outright cheating. (This can be prevented with better controls.) If sensory clues were the problem though, the CCTV experiments would have had different results. This didn’t happen.

There is also the possibility of faulty recording which a problem encountered in all research that relies on humans recording their experiences.

And the last is the experimenter effect. This particular problem is the most interesting thing to come out of the staring studies. You see, because this experiment was so inexpensive, more than one skeptic tried their hand at replication. And a strange phenomenon popped up. They were unsuccessful even when another person reported positive results with the same group. More on this later.

Crossing the “t’s” and Dotting the “i’s”

All of these issues were brought up and dealt with in various papers written on the study. This is typical of parapsychology experiments. Scientists must be extremely thorough because they can and will be criticized for everything, no matter how trivial. Skeptics will breathe fire on them if they butter the wrong side of the toast.

Overall, the experiments were successful. Like most psi experiments, the effect wasn’t particularly large, but thousands of trials demonstrated a very real effect. Sheldrake received more staring studies than the ones he included, but some didn’t get published because they didn’t follow the rules. A rather obscure problem can result from publishing the results of every study submitted. It’s known as the “file drawer effect” (the fancy pants name for this is “selective reporting”).

“File drawer effect” refers to studies that were completed, but never published. If only positive studies are published and studies with no effect are buried, it can skew the results of a meta analysis to a false positive. This was certainly a possibility in a situation like this. Schools which performed the experiment and didn’t get positive results might have failed to submit those studies. If all Sheldrake got back were positive studies, but there were also a bunch of failed studies that never made it to him, then the combined results would not show what really happened.

Sheldrake solved this problem with pre-registration He had an experiment registry and the experiment had to be recorded in it before it started to be included in the overall assessment.

Being Watched and Skeptics

Skeptic Problems Of Being Watched or Stared At

Skeptics did their own experiments, but as usual, even when they got the same result, tried to explain them away: (Wiseman & Smith, 1994, Colwell, Schröder & Sladen, 2000). Wiseman and Smith claimed that the results were due to "the detection and response to structure" present in the randomization. In other words, the subjects were correctly guessing what was coming next because they saw a pattern in the randomization.

What makes this particularly idiotic, in my opinion, is that the particular randomization process used by everyone was one that Wiseman and Smith had themselves suggested. (Counterbalanced randomization: there are the same number of hits on both sides.)

In any case, this complaint was a nonstarter because if it were true, then the subjects would have learned equally well in staring and non - staring trials. This didn’t happen.

There were other cases where skeptics hypothesized alternative explanations, but failed to follow up on them, apparently not caring whether they were right or not, as long as they could find a way to explain away positive results. I don’t know why anyone bothers with these people.

Being Watched - The Experimenter Effect

The experimenter effect was already a known problem in scientific experiments, but this particular staring study highlighted it in a very clear way. When skeptics themselves were the starers, they tended to get chance results. In one case, this occurred even though the skeptic was side by side with a parapsychology researcher, Wiseman & Schlitz (1997). In that case, Wiseman, someone who has a public persona as a psi skeptic and enjoys the spotlight, and Schlitz, an enormously competent psi researcher who has stayed mostly out of the spotlight, could not have been more different in their motivations and intent.

Getting positive results and admitting the reality of psi would have marginalized Wiseman and hurt his public persona. (In 1997, this happened to everyone who took psi research seriously.) Schlitz? Not so much. By staying under the radar and avoiding being in the middle of controversies, she was free to scientifically explore and learn. Hers was a much better psychological position to be in for psi experiments.

If you were aware of this backstory, then the rather dramatic results of the experiment, where Wiseman could not beat chance results at all while Schlitz made it look easy under the same conditions and using the same participants, would be the expected outcome. It also explains why this experiment struggled with replications. It would be difficult to find people quite as different as these two.

The Staring Studies Were Consistent With Other Experiments

There isn’t a lot more to say about the staring studies. It was a simple experiment, the skepticism was weird and unhelpful as usual, and just as importantly, the results of these experiments were consistent with other research.

At the end of the day, the staring experiments are just another replicated experiment confirming the existence of psychic ability. If you need evidence, well then, there it is, along with all the rest. So the question is now answered; can you sense if you are being watched? The answer is yes!

The True Nature of Psi Skeptics

Back in 2008 when I first began writing about psychic ability online, I encountered a lot of skepticism which led to arguments about the Million Dollar Challenge for psychics, created and managed by none other than the late stage magician and skeptic, James Randi. This challenge was certainly convincing to skeptics at the time, so I decided to look into it.

I was more than a little surprised at the emptiness of it. It was ridiculously . . . crude. I did a deep dive into the challenge which I wrote up in my book, but at the time it was already clear that the challenge wasn’t science-based and didn’t prove anything. Anyone who claimed that the challenge proved anything was basically advertising that they didn’t know how science worked. (The challenge did not employ repeatable experiments; they weren’t properly documented; they didn’t use established scientific protocol, but made them up as they went along, leading to amateurish testing. It wasn’t designed to prove anything.)

Skeptic Talking Points Instead of Knowledge

The challenge gave people talking points, but little else. Indeed, the skeptics I encountered would go on and on about how Randi used his magician skills to expose the bad psychics and catch them at their tricks. It did not seem to occur to them that even though this was partially true, it only proved that there were frauds in the professional psychic community, which didn’t prove anything about psychic phenomena in general. There was a gap in their logic that they didn’t seem to comprehend and more importantly, it couldn’t be explained to them.

As I learned more and more about parapsychology and what experiments had actually been done, I also conversed with a lot of skeptics along the way. A pattern emerged. Skeptics are almost universally belligerent, condescending and prone to making declarative statements with no nuance or gray areas. A lot of what they say amounts to talking points and nothing more.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You’ve probably heard this phrase, and it seems ok on the surface, but is it? What makes a claim extraordinary? What counts as extraordinary evidence? This isn’t skepticism so much as it is a vague belief. It’s no more than a rhetorical club to beat people with.

Skeptic Blah!

Skeptic talking points also include: “There is no evidence for psi.” “In the entire history of parapsychology they have never had a successful experiment.” “If psychics existed, one of them would have passed the million dollar challenge” and other nonsense. Any disagreement is met with a demand for proof.

However, very few had enough knowledge to discuss any experiment, let alone discuss it in depth. Those who could talk about the experiments followed a particular path, i.e any source I volunteered was 100% biased and any source they volunteered (usually from a 30 second Internet search) was 100% legitimate. No gray area. Anyone I cited was an idiot, anyone they cited was the authoritative last word. I never heard any subtlety in their thinking at all. For example, in all the years of talking to them, I only ever heard a single skeptic say: “I am not yet convinced by the evidence.” And that was on a forum where the worst of them were consistently kicked off.

Are Skeptics Impartial?

An assumption of skepticism is that both points of view are examined in an even-handed way. That is to say, skepticism is considered to be a position that relies on knowledge and impartial judgment. If either of these are missing, then it’s not really skepticism, it’s something else. The self described skeptics that I have encountered, are usually missing both knowledge and impartial judgment. It’s more zealotry than anything else.

Just to be clear about this, people who actually look into the science of psychic ability find replicated experiments in telepathy, precognition, being stared at, psychokinesis and Reiki, a type of psychic healing. There are also a large number of one-off experiments looking into various interesting areas, that for various reasons couldn’t be easily replicated. (For example, there was a precognition study that examined train crashes in the 50s and a telepathy study with a non verbal autistic child.) In addition there are many investigative reports by scientists that have yielded interesting results that cumulatively provide a form of evidence.

Around half of the world reports having had a psychic experience of some sort and in some countries psychic ability is taken for granted. It isn’t controversial.

For the skeptics to be right, half the world must be fooling itself and all of these thousands of experiments conducted over the years must be faulty in some way. It is an unrealistic, irrational position to take.

Skepticism or Denial?

And this is where we see the true nature of psi (psychic functions) skepticism. Denying the existence of psi takes a certain type of attitude. It requires arrogance because you have to believe that you’re right and other people are crazy or deluded. It requires blindness to other points of view and an ability to explain away inconvenient facts. It requires extremist type logic where you are right and everyone else is wrong. This is usually accompanied by attacking people who disagree with you as idiots.

The thinking that many people follow is that parapsychology has to convince its skeptics in order to be considered legitimate. But this logic automatically grants those skeptics infallible, unquestioned judgment and gives parapsychologists no room to prove that the skeptics are wrong. Indeed, it’s customary for parapsychologists to be forced to confront skeptics at every turn. So instead of explaining their findings and moving the field forward, they have to fight for every fact against people who give them no respect and never concede anything of substance, no matter how strong the evidence. With this set up, doubt is always cast on everything they do and they can never win.

Image: Wyron A - Unsplash

How did the field of parapsychology get into this trap in the first place?

Before I get into the organization that started it all, it’s helpful to know who the skeptics are. With very few exceptions, they are all atheists. Self defined skeptics are a subcategory of anti-theists, aka “New Atheists” who distinguish themselves the following way:

In other words, anti-theists view religion as ignorance and see any individual or institution associated with it as backward and socially detrimental. The Anti-Theist has a clear and – in their view, superior – understanding of the limitations and danger of religions.  They view the logical fallacies of religion as an outdated worldview that is not only detrimental to social cohesion and peace, but also to technological advancement and civilized evolution as a whole.  They are compelled to share their view and want to educate others into their ideological position and attempt to do so when and where the opportunity arises.

You can see that there is a fundamentalist aspect to anti-theism. Self described skeptics are even more radicalized. Skepticism, as practiced, is best described as a fundamentalist version of atheism.

It’s all there if you look for it. Phil Torres, writing for Salon, recently spelled it out in stark language. Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right. In the article he lists a seemingly never ending stream of prominent New Atheists who have landed on the side of the right wing and all its crazy.

I was not surprised. These are the people who coined the term “grief vampire” and accused mediums of preying on the bereaved. There was James Randi who gave out Pigasus awards and insulting nicknames, such as “Gullible Gary” to Prof. Gary Schwartz. They think that they are saving the world from irrational beliefs.

Skeptics Online

The website Skeptical About Skeptics has been documenting what it refers to as “media skeptics” for many years and I documented that kind of behavior back in 2013 in my book: Psi Wars: TED, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet. The language has changed a bit and different social media has arisen, but the song remains the same. There is something wrong with the skeptics.

Which brings us back to the Committee for Scientific Investigation (CSI). Way back in 1976, it was formed at a convention of the American Humanist Association, (Humanist=atheist) and named CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal). (You can find the whole story here.)

The newly formed organization quickly split between those who wanted impartial investigations and those who wanted simply to debunk. The debunkers quickly won and cemented the organization as being forever opposed in every way to the paranormal. The more open minded of the skeptical individuals, including the late Carl Sagan, slowly distanced themselves from the organization.

What exists today is a media organization focused on discrediting the paranormal and parapsychology in particular. If a failed psi research replication shows up in the news, it’s them. If a medium or psychic is discredited in a “study,” it’s them. They accomplish this by using academics to lend credibility to the skeptical message and they have select magazines that they can count on to push the skeptical narrative. (Chris French is a CSI fellow).

Skeptic Competition

They have succeeded for this long by not having any real competition. The paranormal nor the scientific psi community have anything like it to push back against a steady stream of atheist beliefs. By marketing themselves as scientific and reality based and the paranormal and science community around psi as unscientific woomeisters, they’ve gotten the high ground and have become the unquestioned authority.

Skepticism was always overrun with authoritarian types who misunderstood what it was and used the term to gain legitimacy, but in this day and age it’s pretty much synonymous with a radicalized form of atheism pushing their brand of atheistic materialist beliefs. So when you see a skeptic in the news, you’re basically looking at an evangelical atheist trying to convert you to disbelief in the paranormal.

I personally don’t like other people’s beliefs pushed on me disguised as science.

How the Skeptics Lost Their Minds Over a Precognition Experiment

The fun just never stops in Parapsychology. This is the story of a significant experiment that got published in 2011 and the absolutely enormous tsunami of skeptical idiocy that followed. It was entirely predictable. Lies, distortions, character attacks and shady attempts to discredit research is just another Tuesday for this field of science.

The Experiment By Daryl Bem

The researcher was Daryl Bem, professor emeritus at Cornell University and the landmark study was titled: Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect. It was basically a well — known psychology experiment with a couple of parameters switched so that instead of taking measurements of a subject’s physiological reactions after they were exposed to certain stimuli, the measurements were taken before the exposure. The study showed that people were subconsciously reacting to random stimuli even before they experienced it.

As far as parapsychology experiments go, this was nothing out of the ordinary, and it was built on existing studies. In other words, Bem would have had a pretty good idea of what the results would be even before he started. (When I saw the study for the first time, I also had a pretty good idea what the results would be even before I saw it. The nature of the experiment would suggest that a relatively small, but identifiable effect would be found, and that’s what happened.) Want to dive into the weeds? Read the long description here.

Precognition Uproar

So why did this experiment generate such an uproar? It was published in a high prestige psychology journal: The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Bem, 2011) Skeptic James Alcock, who was attacking parapsychology before Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star, wrote an article for the Skeptical Inquirer attempting to discredit the research immediately. Ever true to The Skeptical Way, he threw out any semblance of a careful inquiry in favor of a bombastic declaration:

Careful scrutiny of this report reveals serious flaws in procedure and analysis, rendering this interpretation untenable.

Yup, the skeptic thinks he’s somehow found flaws that the peer reviewers and the journal editor missed, even though they reject about 80% of submitted studies and weren’t exactly open to the idea of psychic ability in the first place. They clearly didn’t measure up to his vast intellectual powers.

The article then launches into a revisionist history of parapsychology, claiming that it is a failed science. This is a necessary preamble to convince his audience that this newest experiment is a failure as well. There were rebuttals by Dean Radin and Daryl Bem. Long story short, this particular criticism went nowhere because it was riddled with errors.

Another critic,

Ray Hyman, another critic dating back to before Star Wars, was determined to get his two cents in:

“It’s craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is allowing this work in,” Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. “I think it’s just an embarrassment for the entire field.”

All that was missing was a big “HARRUMPH!” followed by “Get off my lawn.”

The skeptics never considered the possibility that the peer reviewers and journal editor-in-chief accepted the experiment for publication because their scientific integrity outweighed their cognitive dissonance.

In an unusual move, Wagenmaker was allowed to respond as a comment on Bem’s paper. You can find it here. Wagenmaker performed a Bayesian analysis, which is different from the statistics method normally applied to psi research.

Statistical Analysis

Bayesian statistics incorporates beliefs and probabilities into the analysis. This is great for dealing with problems where evidence is either vague or when you have conflicting evidence. Did Bob shoot his neighbor? Blood samples matched, (probable guilt is implied using the frequentest statistics) but they were close friends; he had no motive, and he had an alibi. (Probably not guilty using Bayesian statistics.)

The problem with using Bayesian statistics on controversial subjects is that you’re required to plug in your biases, which can lead to garbage in, garbage out. That’s what happened here. Wagenmaker calculated the odds against psi existing at 99,999,999,999,999,999,999 to one. You also have to input the probable effect size. This is a more complicated number, but the gist of this is that Wagenmaker’s premise is that psi is absolutely impossible, but if it were to exist, it would show up in the form of superpowers. Starting with a premise like that, it’s not surprising at all that he failed to find evidence for psi. (You can find Bem’s response to Wagenmaker here.)

Wagenmaker was not finished, however. He then wrote a rebuttal, which you can find here. And here is where things went completely off the deep end. In this paper, he argues that he’s not wrong: the problem is the entire field of psychology. In other words, he’s in favor of throwing out an entire field of science to make one positive result go away.

Absurdities

The absurd premise goes like this: Psychic ability is impossible. Therefore, if Bem’s experiment showed psychic ability to be real, then the very process that demonstrated this must be broken. These are the musings of people who would never, ever consider the alternative hypothesis: They. Are. Wrong.

Bem’s experiment survived this challenge because the ultimate premise of Wagenmaker’s argument was clearly wrong. (He had other accusations, such as calling the experiments “preliminary”, but these went nowhere.)

Skeptical Enquiry

But this was far from the end of the battle. Enter Richard Wiseman, Chris French and Stuart Ritchie. The first two are fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and likely skeptic lifers. Wiseman, in all his years of association with parapsychology, has never run a successful psi experiment to my knowledge. He and French have collaborated before on at least one other failed psi experiment. What’s really weird is that both of them make a point of publicizing their failures. Here and here. Wiseman publicized his supposed debunking of Sheldrake’s famous dog experiment and publicized his meta analysis of the Ganzfeld experiment which supposedly showed no effect. (The latter two do not have media links to follow. They were pre-Internet.) It’s almost as if they WANT to fail.

I was well aware of Wiseman and French before the saga of Bem’s experiment got rolling, so imagine my surprise when I read that Wiseman and French had failed to replicate Bem’s study, I was Shocked, SHOCKED I tell you. (You can find their studies here.) Of course, they publicized their failure. And here.

Skeptics everywhere breathed a sigh of relief that a crisis had been avoided. A failed replication? End of story. But as usual, things were far from that simple. Wiseman had set up a registry for experiments that ended in December 2011. It was far too short a time frame for most scientists to find time to replicate an experiment that had just been published.

More Experimentation

Also, there were six experiments in total, including Bem’s. Two studies, both having significant levels of success, had pre-registered with Wiseman yet were not included. The three studies done by Wiseman et al., amounted to the same number of trials as Bem’s original study. In other words, there was an apparent attempt to make it sound like there were more replication failures than there really were and data was deliberately excluded, apparently to reach a particular conclusion. (The description of these issues can be found in a comment at the end of Wiseman’s paper.)

All of that became a moot point, scientifically at least, in 2015 with the publication of a meta analysis of 90 experiments. In science, a few failed replications are meaningless if more are coming. In the case of Wiseman and French’s failed studies, they were simply drowned out by more studies with positive results.

There are still claims out there that there were methodological errors in Bem’s study, but here’s the thing: errors in methodology almost always produce null results. They create noise that drowns out the measurement of the effect. Also, they are not replicable. If you were looking for errors in Bem’s work, you’d focus on finding a statistical error; a wrong decimal point, a number misplaced, that sort of thing. Those types of errors, though, tend to get spotted when a lot of people start looking at the study, as was the case here. Bem’s paper was vetted by people who clearly understand statistics. In particular, past president of the American Statistical Association, Jessica Utts examined the study. In any case, that type of error was never brought up.

Conclusion

The point I want to make here, in conclusion, is that the skeptical position in regard to Bem’s experiment is all smoke and mirrors. Once you clearly see the smoke and mirrors for what they are, you see what skepticism really is: cognitive dissonance writ large. The problem here is not the study design or the number of replications or the statistics used, the problem is people: people who refuse to accept study results because they can’t ever admit they were wrong.

The discussion isn’t about science anymore. This is about zealotry. Psi is real and there is plenty of science to back it up. The objections are insulting to any sane person’s intelligence at this point and the lengths that skeptics go to in order to maintain their narrative are fundamentally dishonest. And that’s the real problem. The skepticism is less than sane and it’s time to take a much closer look at THAT problem. You can start here.

I have seen these people go to the ends of the earth and beyond, conjuring fictional narratives so that they never, ever have to concede. I’ve seen this from garden variety skeptics on the Internet and from academics. How much longer do we have to placate their delicate egos by maintaining the fiction that psychic ability isn’t real?