"All the World's a Stage We Pass Through" R. Ayana

Showing posts with label sceptics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sceptics. Show all posts

Thursday, 18 December 2014

Developing Your Unseen Powers: A Practical Guide


Developing Your Unseen Powers:
 A Practical Guide

 https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5604/15571925942_7b262a7f01_k.jpg

 

By Brendan D. Murphy



‘Repeated ignorant or stubborn denial of the existence of certain powers does not keep them from existing – except for us!’
– Harold M. Sherman, psychic




tumblr_m3xz6fRhqQ1r391oso1_500Everyone has some level of innate intuitive capability, as has been demonstrated repeatedly over several decades of experiments by the parapsychological community through tens of thousands of trials utilising thousands of regular people with no known or presupposed psychic gifts. (That is to say nothing, of course, of those many successful experiments carried out with people having well established reputations for performing “paranormal” feats.)

While some people are born with obvious psychic talents, most of us have to invest time and effort over the long-term in order to develop them from their latent state. In this article we will look at some guidelines and relevant principles for unblocking and developing your innate intuitive abilities.


Open Your Mind & Eliminate Closed Ones


Have you ever noticed how closed-minded sceptics (CMS) rarely if ever have any experiences with the siddhis (psychic faculties) or “the paranormal” in general? Soviet research into psychokinesis involving Nina Kulagina demonstrated qualitatively that a sceptic’s mere presence has an effect on a psychic’s ability to function properly. Hence, with a CMS (or several) in the room or otherwise involved in the experiment, a psychic is more likely to “fail,” thus “proving” the CMS right (at least in his own narrow reality tunnel). It is merely a case of self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, regarding your own psi abilities what you believe is true, to a large extent – and unfortunately the presence of non-believers nearby or within the experimental setup can be detrimental.

Dr. Valerie Hunt’s research in Infinite Mind showed a correlation between electromagnetic auric frequencies and the “level” of consciousness occupied by the individual. Healers, mediums and mystics show higher frequencies in their electromagnetic fields than others not of those categories, illustrating that those possessed of “higher” consciousness are, in some sense, literally “on a higher frequency.” Those fixated on or believing solely in “material reality” exhibited lower dominant frequencies and were bereft of the higher.

In fact, gamma frequencies in the brain of 40-100 Hertz – the highest of the better known bands of brainwave frequencies (the higher band being Lambda, reaching up to about 200 Hz1) – have been linked to the ability to manifest intention in the world. Gamma states represent the brain in hyperdrive, working at its most intensity. “This oscillation is conducive to creating links across many parts of the brain,”2 facilitating an integrated whole-brain state. Paradoxically, the extreme high and low ends of the brainwave spectrum have the same states of consciousness associated with them, and different oscillations can be present at once in different parts of the same brain.3

To illustrate, Russian psychokinetic (PK) psi star Nina Kulagina (1926–1990) – who, under controlled experimental conditions, could (among other things) separate an egg yoke from the white from a distance of 6 feet while it floated in a saline solution using only her intention – exhibited low frequency theta brainwaves of 4 Hz – normally associated with a deeply relaxed trance – whilst simultaneously showing extreme physiological agitation/arousal, including a pulse rate of 240 bpm. These strenuous efforts left her absolutely exhausted, and temporarily blind on that particular occasion.4

Perhaps all of the above explains why Kulagina’s PK abilities “worked better in an atmosphere of friendly mutual trust and belief” – PK, as we know, generally requires intense states of physiological arousal and higher frequency brainwave activity, all of which drains large reserves of bioenergy. PK is a higher brain function. Kulagina experienced less stress when working alone and it was said that her PK ability was mood-dependent (both her own mood and that of the observers) and expended more energy in a hostile or sceptical atmosphere5 (where the local consciousness fields would have been less coherent). Hostile sceptics have something of an innate psi- or consciousness-damping effect; they literally operate at a lower frequency, their mind fields interfering with those of the test subject (and even the target). The fact that separate minds interact via measurable electromagnetic fields (and some not-so-measurable fields) has been proven by Hunt and others, and I detail much of this research in The Grand Illusion (TGI).

Negativity causes chaos and/or entropy in the personal and local ambient energy fields, whereas positivity, gratitude, or love – heart-based emotions – cause coherence, beauty and order – just look at the instances of saints and yogis whose dead bodies have remained impervious to decay for weeks, months, and even years!6 This is worth considering before any psi endeavour where you intend to act as a receiver of information. Firstly, open-mindedness is a bare minimum requirement (confidence and trust in the process is even better). Additionally, being in a state of peaceful heart-based coherence is likely to enhance receptive abilities. In combination with deliberate intention, this has been shown to also be enough to wind and unwind DNA samples at will in laboratory conditions, with powerful implications for self-healing possibilities (see TGI).

In 1942 psychologist and parapsychologist Gertrude Schmeidler initiated her infamous “sheep-goat” experiments, designed to test whether belief and open-mindedness would enhance psi function in contrast to scepticism. Two groups, “sheep” who believed in or were simply open to psi, and “goats” who did not believe it could happen for them under test conditions (but were not hostile to the possibility of it happening to or for other people), were put through identical standard controlled Extrasensory Perception (ESP) tests. The outcome indicated that believers in the possibility of ESP scored better than those who did not: the disbelievers scored lower, ergo belief is a legitimate variable mediating psi functions.7 “A meta-analysis by [psychologist Tony Lawrence], covering 73 experiments by 37 different researchers, clearly confirms that subjects who believe in psi obtain, on the average, higher results than those who do not believe in it.”8

American psychic and author Harold Sherman (1898–1987) had noted in the early 1940s that while it is possible to receive thought impressions from a sceptic, it is extremely difficult for someone of that mindset to act as receiver.9 Sherman, who was ahead of his time, explained that telling yourself with certitude there is no such thing as psi is tantamount to instructing your subconscious mind to shut down the psi faculties so they do not operate for you.10 In a dream-like reality such as ours, it pays to be open-minded – especially if you want to be more intuitive.


Meaning, Emotion, Need, Novelty & Other Factors in Psi


https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3942/15104448594_872e3c0f23_h.jpgNeed, novelty, and emotion have long been known to play a part in psi phenomena. Carl Jung (1875–1961) – the originator of the theory of psychological archetypes – noted with interest that the English medium Eileen Garrett fared poorly in parapsychologist J.B. Rhine’s card-guessing experiments because she was unable to conjure any feelings for Rhine’s “soulless” test-cards.11 Much experimentation has also shown that psi effects have a tendency to start out higher in the initial stages of testing and then drop off as the participants lose interest and boredom sets in (the “decline effect”).

Charles Tart actually went so far as stating that card-guessing experiments are, ironically, “a technique for extinguishing [psi] in the laboratory,” that is, they bore the subjects into a decline effect.12 Rhetorically, Sherman asked how he could possibly be expected to get excited over five abstract symbols that had nothing to do with his emotional system or that of the sender (they lacked meaning/personal significance or relevance).13

Biologist and author Lyall Watson notes in Supernature that the most effective telepathic messages generally are bound up in trauma and crisis – and we see plenty of evidence to that effect in The Grand Illusion Vol. 1. He continues to explain that it makes sense biologically, since states of well-being and pleasure produce no sense of urgency – such information can be leisurely conveyed by the “normal” channels. However, for alarm signals to be of real use, they have to travel the fastest way possible.14 That “way” is superluminally/nonlocally. Much as Cleve Backster’s plants could detect the death of bacteria and brine shrimp nearby, our human telepathic connections must – even if only subliminally – serve a biological imperative, helping us survive and propagate as a species by sensing and avoiding danger.

The limbic system, which includes the amygdala and hippocampus, is considered today to be the emotional centre in the brain, as well as the seat of our survival instinct. We might therefore suppose that life-threatening events, usually being highly emotionally charged, might ignite the temporal lobe and related structures in the brain into downloading nonlocal psi information from the vacuum/aether. Dr. Melvin Morse believes humans have a sixth sensory ability located “within” the right temporal lobe, hippocampus, and related limbic structures. According to him, this region “interprets information obtained through communication with an interactive universe,” and allows for telepathic communication with other people through their right temporal lobes. “It involves perception of other realities.” He states that we perceive the operation of the right temporal lobe as “intuition.”15

In 1889 a committee of psychical researchers began a five-year project of compiling what they named a Report on the Census of Hallucinations – the first major research effort of the English Society for Psychical Research, featuring 410 data collectors. The committee included Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick, Alice Johnson, arch-sceptic Frank Podmore, and the esteemed Frederick Myers. Out of the 17,000 responses, 2,273 people reported having had “hallucinations” (psi experiences). Tellingly, most occurred in a crisis, usually a death crisis, signifying the importance of emotion, need, and above all, meaning in paranormal events.16 These were some of the earliest scientific results illustrating nonlocal correlations between well-acquainted (meaningfully connected) people.

Aside from raw emotion, biological threats to loved ones (or oneself), and so on, another factor conducive to psi is simply novelty. Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in their scientific remote viewing research in the 1970s found that the more difficult and challenging a remote viewing (RV) task they devised for test subjects, the more likely the results were to be good. They, too, observed a need-serving theme in their RV research at Stanford (see Chapter 12 of TGI). As a result of consistently challenging and interesting tests and protocols (with the added benefits of feedback and encouragement), they found that their subjects actually improved their psi performance over time, in contrast to Rhine’s and others’ results with card-guessing and other repetitious and dull forms of testing, where decline effects were often observed.

In Sherman’s view, the absence of a strong or even an ordinary emotional factor is the greatest handicap in any psychic endeavour. Since his pioneering long-distance telepathy experiment with Sir Hubert Wilkins decades ago (detailed in New Dawn 136 and Chapter 11 of TGI), much data has accumulated indicating there is a great deal of truth in this. The stronger the emotional charge, the greater the likelihood that psi data will penetrate from the “subconscious” to the conscious mind.

It is well known by occultists that emotionally charged events are more likely to impress themselves, inadvertently or otherwise, on the mind of another than are events with little emotional content. In occult terms, this interaction beyond the standard space-time realm is occurring via the astral plane/octave – the home of emotion. The more strongly the plasma-like astral body/field (or mind-field) can be made to vibrate in response to emotional content, the more likely the relevant data penetrates through from the subconscious to the conscious level of awareness. When sleep is involved, the conditions seem to be even more conducive to accidental telepathic contact, as it is an altered state of consciousness (theta and delta brainwave states) that opens us up to the frequencies of the astral or even mental planes while simultaneously eliminating most data/noise from the physical senses.

Undoubtedly, much “paranormal phenomena” (including poltergeist phenomena, PK, and telepathy) can be linked to strong emotional content. There are indications that what we experience as presentiment or precognition may be, in some sense, the strong emotional content of a probable “future” event (which is actually occurring in a parallel universe in present time, along with all our “past” and “future” lives) then filtering “back” through time into our subconscious or even conscious awareness. (See Chapter 12 of TGI.)

Hypnosis

 

Hypnosis can aid our ability to peer into these “future” events and timelines. The young actress Irene Muza was in a hypnotic trance when she was asked if she could see what awaited her in her future. She wrote that her career would be short and her death would be “terrible,” though she dared not specify how she would die. The experimenters erased what Muza had written before bringing her out of the trance so she would not see it. She therefore had no conscious knowledge of what she had written. Some months later, however, in 1909, her prediction of a short career and terrible death was unexpectedly fulfilled when her hairdresser allowed some drops of an antiseptic lotion made of mineral essences to fall on a lighted stove, instantly enveloping Muza in flames. Her hair and clothing set alight, she was severely burned and tragically died in hospital a few hours later.17

Hypnosis has been successfully employed for psychokinetic purposes as well. Take American Ted Serios, the “thoughtographer” born in 1918 who could create colour pictures on unexposed film simply through sheer will and intention while he stared into the lens of a Polaroid camera. His talent grew out of a DIY hypnosis experiment with a friend (a fellow bellhop at the Chicago Conrad Hilton Hotel) who instructed Serios under hypnosis that he could take photos of the contents of his mind. And thereafter, so he could – somewhat erratically, mind you. (Serios was tested extensively under controlled conditions.)

Interestingly, Serios had to work himself virtually into a state of rage to be effective during these experiments. Notably, Israeli “paranormalist” Uri Geller has been able to achieve similar feats, taking photos of himself on high-speed black and white film through a solid black lens cap. Dr. Chris Humphrey explains this is due to quantum tunnelling: if the quantum de Broglie probability wave exists on both sides of a barrier, then its particle (photons in this case) can sometimes be on one side, and sometimes on the other, without ever passing through the barrier.18


PK: Set Your Intent, Let Go & “Let God”

During his first stay at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI – now Stanford Research Institute International), Ingo Swann worked on experiments with physicist Hal Puthoff, who was making forays into researching psi ability. This example demonstrates that we can and do interact with matter via our minds, whether we intend to consciously or not (and even under pressure and in the presence of sceptics in this case).

On the evening of the 6th of June 1972, Swann was asked to try to influence a magnetometer located in the basement, which he was duly escorted down to, with one catch: the magnetometer – inside a quark detector, in actual fact – was buried under five feet of concrete underneath his feet, and thus invisible to him. What was visible to the extremely chagrined Swann (who was not forewarned by Puthoff of the nature of the experiment) was a chart recorder with its pen slowly tracing out a graceful wavy line. It was “monitoring the magnetic stability of the magnetometer and had been doing so for some weeks without any change in the rhythmic fluctuations,” Swann recalls. “The whole of this contraption was encased in an aluminium container and insulating copper canister. As well, it was in a supercooled, hence superconducting shield.” The Josephson junction inside the detector would detect any variation of magnetic flux in the supercooled equipment and the effect would show up as a change in the steady sine wave recording on the chart which they could all see.

Swann started “probing” mentally to see if he could identify the expensive underground device, and when he sensed some “metallic differences” he tried to affect them, stating so as he went along. With all eyes glued on the sine wave, Swann attempted several times to perturb the well-shielded system, but to no avail. Insisting that he could see something, Swann proposed that sketching it out might assist the process. When no paper could be found to draw on, Puthoff suggested he draw directly onto the chart paper. “So I sketched a this, and then a that: ‘Is this the Josephson junction?’ I asked. ‘If so, I think I can see it quite well’.”

With that comment, the ink pen gave a tiny jerk, and then stopped momentarily. Then it lifted up above its previous pattern, and “somewhat above this it wobbled along for no less than about TEN SECONDS – long enough for two wavy line intervals to have occurred.”19

The point here is that when the distortion in the sine wave took place Swann was not trying to affect the equipment – he was simply trying to sketch what he could see with his mind’s eye. In those moments where his volitional mind was distracted and his goal momentarily suspended, the desired outcome occurred effortlessly. In laboratory tests with PK in ordinary people (Swann is known to be a gifted psychic, though more in the realm of remote viewing than PK), effects often fail to appear until the subject has their attention diverted.20 This is something that astral traveller Sylvan Muldoon wrote of some 80 years ago, explaining that charging the mind with desire or intent creates “stress” for which the mind seeks an outlet or release via a part of the subconscious he called the cryptoconscious Will: “Then [it] gets a chance to work on the ‘stress,’ and that which you had given up trying to attain ‘materialises’!”21


Tips for Development

  • Open your mind to the possibility that psi can work for you

  • Believe in yourself

  • Operate in a peaceful state of heart-based coherence for receptive psi (such as receiving a telepathic signal)

  • Remove yourself from distractions and hostile or sceptical parties whose chaotic energy fields may negatively influence your own

  • Meditate for psi development (the more the better). If you can participate in a group of people with a mutual interest in their perceptual development, then all the better. I used to attend a trance mediumship group – not necessarily because I wanted to “channel,” but it did accelerate my clairvoyant development. The coherent group energy will heighten and refine your own through a “quantum additive” effect, accelerating your development. When I stopped attending the group my nascent clairvoyant faculties unfortunately regressed back to square one.

  • For PK, a less passive, more aroused state of heightened emotion may be desirable. If you want to bend spoons or change the weather it might help to get fired up!

  • Eliminate psi-negative beliefs at the conscious level by being well informed on the reality of the psi faculties (reading my book TGI 1 will definitely achieve that goal).

  • Eliminate subconscious negative (psi-blocking) beliefs through techniques such as Psyche-K and perhaps also EFT.

  • Try letting go and “getting out of the way.” Sometimes your intention has a way of manifesting when you direct your attention on to something else, or, as some have put it, when you “let go and let God.” Try setting your intention, letting the thought go, and trusting that the deed will be done.

  • A slightly different tactic: be grateful in advance that your attempt has already been successful. “All great masters know in advance that the deed has been done.” The aether/vacuum doesn’t “do” linear time. It only “knows” the present moment. Thus, what is true for you in the present is what will continually present itself to you until that truth changes.

  • If you want to design experiments or tests for receptive/perceptual psi, find ways to make it novel, interesting, and meaningful to you personally. Avoid boredom at all costs!

  • Practise some form of pranayama (yogic breathing) on a daily basis for maximal development of your health and psychic faculties.


You can read more about this subject matter in Brendan Murphy’s new book The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis Of Science And Spirituality – Book 1, available for purchase at www.brendandmurphy.net.


 https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8473/8134667398_5ba57d4a9a_h.jpg

Footnotes

1. Extraordinary States, www.bethcoleman.net/gamma.html.
2. D. Church, The Genie in Your Genes, Energy Psychology Press, 2009, 99.
3. Extraordinary States.
4. L. Watson, Supernature, Coronet Books, Hodder Paperbacks Ltd, 1974, 139-40.
5. J.D. LaMoth & L.F. Maire III (Defence Intelligence Agency), Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research, 1975.
6. See B.D. Murphy, The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science & Spirituality Vol. 1, Balboa Press, 2013.
7. I. Swann, Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/RealStoryCh9.html
8. Who is Mario Varvoglis?, www.parapsych.org/members/m_varvoglis.html.
9. H. Wilkins & Harold Sherman, Thoughts Through Space, Hampton Roads, 2004, xx.
10. Thoughts Through Space, xxi.
11. C.G. Jung, Synchronicity, First Princeton/Bollingen Paperback Edition, 1973, 18.
12. Russell Targ & Harold Puthoff, Mind-Reach, Hampton Roads, 2005, 11.
13. Thoughts Through Space, 129.
14. Supernature, 260.
15. P.M.H. Atwater, The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences, Hampton Roads, 2007, 340.
16. M. Grosso, Experiencing the Next World Now, Paraview Pocket Books, 2004, 27-8.
17. C. Wilson, The Occult, Watkins Publishing, 2004, 127-8.
18. C. Humphrey, UFOs, Psi and Spiritual Evolution, Adventures Unlimited Press, 2004.
19. I. Swann, The Varian Hall of Physics, www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/RealStoryCh37.html.
20. Supernature, op. cit., 151-2.
21. S. Muldoon & Hereward Carrington, The Projection of the Astral Body, Rider Books, 1992.




BRENDAN D. MURPHY is the author of the critically acclaimed epic The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality, Vol. 1, and a contributing writer for several popular magazines and websites. If you like this article, then “like” “The Grand Illusion (TGI)” fan page on Facebook for more articles, information, book excerpts, and general developments. Hailed as a “masterpiece” by fellow leading-edge author Sol Luckman (Potentiate Your DNA), Volume 1 of TGI is now available for purchase at www.brendandmurphy.net.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 7 No 2
© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.


From New Dawn @ http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/developing-your-unseen-powers-a-practical-guide

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Thursday, 19 December 2013

What Gorilla? Why Some Can’t See Psychic Phenomena


What Gorilla? Why Some Can’t See Psychic Phenomena


Maze Mind

By Dean Radin


Imagine you’re watching a basketball game. Your favourite team is wearing white and the other team is in black. In the midst of the action, someone in a dark gorilla suit calmly walks to the centre of the court, waves to the crowd, then walks off the court. Do you think you would notice this peculiar event? Most people might say yes. Most people would be wrong. 

Our perceptual system unconsciously filters out the vast majority of information available to us. Because of this filtering process, we actually experience only a tiny trickle of information, by some estimates a trillionth of what is actually out there. And yet from that trickle our minds construct what we expect to see. So when we pay attention to our favourite white-shirted basketball team, the likelihood of clearly seeing darker objects moving about is substantially reduced. That includes even obvious objects, like gorillas.

Psychologists call this phenomenon “inattentional blindness,” and it’s just one of many ways in which our prior beliefs, interests and expectations shape the way we perceive the world and cause us to overlook the obvious.

Because of these blind spots, some common aspects of human experience literally cannot be seen by those who’ve spent decades embedded within the Western scientific worldview. That worldview, like any set of cultural beliefs inculcated from childhood, acts like the blinders they put on skittish horses to keep them calm. Between the blinders we see with exceptional clarity, but seeing beyond the blinders is not only exceedingly difficult, after a while it’s easy to forget that your vision is restricted.

An important class of human experience that these blinders exclude is psychic phenomena, those commonly reported spooky experiences, such as telepathy and clairvoyance, that suggest we are deeply interconnected in ways that transcend the ordinary senses and our everyday notions of space and time.

Exclusion of these phenomena creates a Catch 22: Human experiences credibly reported throughout history, across all cultures, and at all educational levels, repeatedly tell us that psychic phenomena exist. But Big Science – especially as portrayed in prominent newspapers and popular magazines like Scientific American – says it doesn’t.

Well then, is this gorilla in the basketball game, or not? One way to find out is to study the question using the highly effective tools of science while leaving the worldview assumptions behind. That way we can study the question without prejudice, like watching a basketball game without preferring either the white or black team. Neutral observers are much more likely to spot a gorilla, if one is indeed present.

This form of investigation has been going on for over a century, and despite official denials, the jury is in: Some psychic phenomena do exist. But like blindingly obvious gorillas, not everyone can see them. (Actually, like the majority of the general public, many scientists do have these experiences, but as in the parable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, fledgling science students quickly learn in college that it is not politically expedient to talk about it.)

Here’s an example of not seeing. In the July/August 2008 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer (the Playboy of the enthusiastic debunker), neuroscientist Amir Raz and psychologist Ray Hyman describe their impressions of an invitation-only scientific meeting held on “anomalous cognition” at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in July 2007. Anomalous cognition is a neutral euphemism for psychic or “psi” phenomena, one that avoids the connotation of séances and ghostbusting associated with the touchy p-words. I was a co-organiser of the UBC meeting. Sixty prominent scientists and physicians were invited to the meeting, including a couple of Nobel Laureates, representing a variety of disciplines and perspectives.

Not surprisingly, given the skeptical focus of the magazine in which their essays appeared, Raz and Hyman both concluded that they were not persuaded by what they heard at the meeting, that nothing interesting was going on, and that the scientific pursuit of anomalous cognition is akin to a misguided search for the Tooth Fairy (Raz’s term).

Now, let me preface what I’m about to say by first noting that I respect Raz’s and Hyman’s opinions and I’m glad that they attended the UBC meeting. There is always room for critical debate in science; as President Dubya once said in another context, “Bring it on.” But what I am concerned about is that sometimes holding a fruitful debate stalls before it can get off the ground because one side regards the topic as fantasy. And so to make a point I’ll be ruthless in pointing out problems with these two authors’ opinions.

One of Raz’s principal complaints was that he would “be curious to see compelling scientific demonstrations of psi (i.e., a string of multiple successful experiments by several independent investigators producing lawful and replicable outcomes). Alas, I have found none to date.”

When I first read that statement I felt like I increasingly do these days when driving past a gas station. What did that sign say? A gallon of gas costs what? Didn’t we discuss several classes of repeatable experiments at the UBC meeting? For example, I presented an overview of “presentiment” experiments, an unconscious precognitive effect that has been independently and successfully replicated numerous times. (Nearly all of the 20 experiments I’m aware of to date have produced results in the predicted direction, and of those 10 were independently statistically significant.)

And among researchers who have closely studied the psi literature, the vast majority have little doubt that something interesting is going on, something not easily attributable to chance or to any known conventional artefacts. These effects are in principle no more difficult to demonstrate than the efficacy of new pharmaceutical drugs or medical procedures. Such effects tend to be small in magnitude, they are highly reactive to the psychosocial context and other environmental factors, and they take substantial amounts of careful data collection to overcome the statistical noise generated by dozens of poorly understood interactive factors. But they are real, and they are repeatable in the laboratory.

Real and repeatable, and yet what Raz meant by a “compelling” demonstration does not exist for him, at least not yet. When one regards evidence from a position where the claimed phenomenon is viewed as exceedingly unlikely, like a gorilla on a basketball court, then the evidence required to change one’s mind must be super-powerful. Not merely a string of successful experiments by independent investigators, as Raz calls for, but effects that are robust enough to be easily repeatable by anyone, anywhere, any time, and highly stable over long periods of time. And better yet, the effect should be predicted by a theory that doesn’t do much violence to orthodox dogma about how the world works.

This is what I call the “UFO landing on the White House lawn” type of evidence. Alas, such robust evidence is rarely available when dealing with phenomena at the bleeding edge of the known. And it’s true that the evidence for psi today does not quite achieve the status of a Special New Bulletin interrupting the season finale of ‘Lost’ by reporting a UFO landing on the White House lawn (would anyone believe such a story, even if it were true?). Instead, the evidence available today for psi is more like a formation of UFOs repeatedly flying over the US Capitol, captured on film and spotted simultaneously by radar, jet pilots, and hundreds of witnesses on the ground. Well, surely that would convince a few people.

Oh, wait. Such a UFO sighting actually did occur in Washington DC in 1952. All the major newspapers carried the story. But who remembers that today?

Perhaps Ray Hyman does. Hyman earned his PhD in 1953 at John Hopkins University, near Washington DC. Today, Hyman is a retired psychology professor who has been one of the premier academic critics of parapsychology for over 50 years. In his essay in Skeptical Inquirer, his major complaint was the lack of easy repeatability of psi effects. To support his claim he cited “a psi proponent reported a meta-analysis of [a class of telepathy experiments] with an average effect size that significantly differed from zero with odds of more than a trillion to one while another meta-analysis… concluded that the average effect size was consistent with zero.” (A meta-analysis is a quantitative review of many similar experiments.) He bolstered this assertion by citing a few parapsychologists who have acknowledged difficulties in producing “UFO on the White House lawn” form of evidence. From this viewpoint, he concluded that parapsychology does not deserve serious scientific attention. He’s been repeating this opinion for 50 years.


http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2808/9852890924_a6c12a2b86_k.jpgExcept there’s a small problem. The parapsychologists mentioned by Hyman were expressing well known difficulties in producing robust repeatable effects on demand. But none of them doubt that the preponderance of evidence strongly indicates the presence of genuine anomalies. Hyman’s selective reporting is akin to dismissing as worthless a clearly visible formation of UFOs flying over the US Capitol, because of a stubborn insistence that the only acceptable data are UFOs landing on the White House lawn precisely at high noon, followed by alien pilots emerging from their crafts, offering tea and biscuits to the President and Vice President of the United States, and then soberly shooting the VP in the face with a projectile weapon (due to regarding that act as a sign of diplomatic friendship, having unfortunately misinterpreted a news story regarding the former Vice President’s shooting his friend in the face – but I digress).

There’s another problem, one more substantial. Hyman’s damning denouement was that not all meta-analyses of telepathy experiments were judged to be positive. By mentioning the meta-analysis where the “average effect size was consistent with zero,” he reinforced his contention that telepathy experiments are slippery and unrepeatable, and not to be trusted. The study he cited appeared in a 1999 publication by British psychologists Julie Milton from the University of Edinburgh and Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire. They analysed a selected subset of telepathy experiments, ended up with a positive but statistically non-significant result, and then quite reasonably concluded that nothing interesting was going on. Well, as I said, there’s always room for debate. Except when conclusions are based on a mistake. It turns out that their analysis was miscalculated.

Jessica Utts, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Irvine, explained at the UBC meeting that Milton and Wiseman had employed a technique that underestimated the actual telepathy effect. If they had used the same (simpler and more powerful) technique employed in all of the other published telepathy meta-analyses, they would have reached the same conclusion that everyone else did: There is indeed significant positive and repeatable evidence for telepathy obtained under controlled laboratory conditions.

Hyman was in the audience during Utts’ presentation. I don’t know why he chose to ignore her analysis, although if he had acknowledged it that would have neutralised his own arguments. So perhaps its exclusion is not so puzzling.

Speculations aside, one thing is crystal clear: It can take a White House lawn party to overcome one’s long-held beliefs, so if nothing obviously wrong can be found in a reported experiment, skeptics will still worry if the experiment was conducted by “believers,” because they imagine that believers would not be as rigorously careful as “non-believers.” Indeed, fervent skeptics are quite vocal in asserting that non-believers cannot get the same results in these experiments. Unfortunately, the fact is that skeptics hardly ever conduct these studies, and on the scant occasions when they do, they rarely publish them in sufficient detail to evaluate the results. So we really don’t know whether the suspicion is justified or not.

That is, until recently. In 2005 two keenly skeptical psychologists, Edward Delgado-Romero from the University of Georgia and George Howard from the University of Notre Dame, conducted the same type of telepathy experiment under consideration here. To their chagrin, they not only obtained a significant positive outcome after conducting a series of eight studies, but their results were perfectly in alignment with the earlier meta-analytic estimates. That is, based on thousands of previous trials, it is possible to estimate the “hit rate” one should get when running a standard telepathy experiment. Delgado-Romero and Howards obtained exactly that value. To their credit, they published their results.

But their article also included an astounding twist: They ended up rejecting their own experimental evidence based on a single additional study they conducted, which they based on an ad hoc, untested design they proposed, and which ultimately resulted in a statistically significant negative outcome! Strong negative outcomes are just as important statistically speaking, and just as unlikely to occur by chance, as strong positive outcomes. Both indicate that something interesting is going on.

Another way of illustrating the invisibility of gorillas is by revealing an asymmetry in how psi experiments are reported in newspapers. In January 2008, newspapers around the world hailed the first conclusive test for telepathy conducted by two Harvard University researchers. According to the Boston Globe: “Brain scan tests fail to support validity of ESP. Research on parapsychology is largely taboo in academia, but two Harvard scientists recently set out to settle, once and for all, the age-old question: Is extrasensory perception, or ESP, real? Their sophisticated experiment answers: No, at least, not as far as they can tell using high-tech brain scanners to detect neural evidence of it.”

Finally. Once and for all. A sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging brainscanner was used (technically, an fMRI), for the first time, to answer this age-old question. The high-tech “no” answer seems conclusive unless you read the actual article, which reported that one of 16 tests conducted showed a stupendously significant outcome exactly in alignment with what was predicted if psi were real. But the authors then took pains to explain why that result was probably an artefact, and so the newspapers didn’t mention that one intriguing outcome. (It also makes one question why they employed an experimental design which allowed positive results to be explained away so easily.)

But the study was conducted at Harvard, for goodness sake, so surely that’s the last word on ESP. After all, for the first time ever Harvard scientists used one of those expensive and mysterious fMRI brainscanners to peer deep inside the brain, and they didn’t see any psi in there. End of story, no?

Well, no. Was this really the first psi study conducted using an fMRI? No, it wasn’t even the second such study. Or the third. Or fourth. Or fifth. It was the sixth. And all of the earlier experiments, all conducted since 2000, showed significant evidence for psi effects. Somehow the newspapers overlooked this, despite the fact that most of those studies are freely available in an instant via PubMed.gov, the National Institutes of Health massive online bibliography of scientific articles related to health and healing.

I could continue along the same vein ad nauseum when it comes to how scientific evidence for psi is often ignored or distorted beyond recognition. Unfortunately, there are countless other tales of ignoring other invisible gorillas at the frontiers of knowledge. They include serious scientific arguments that global warming is not being caused by human activities, analyses suggesting that HIV does not cause AIDS, repeatable electrochemical-nuclear reactions once known as “cold-fusion,” credible reports of UFOs, and so on.

 All of these ideas encounter strong sociopolitical resistance in academia, so credible counter-arguments are difficult to locate and even more difficult to discuss in scientific forums unless you have a phalanx of beefy bodyguards watching your back. One of the best sources of information about these “frontier” science topics is the Journal of Scientific Exploration, a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal published by the Society for Scientific Exploration.

Without belabouring the point, such tales expose a skeleton in the closet of Big Science. From the popular perspective, science is portrayed as a flawlessly rational enterprise, where accumulating evidence slowly but surely overcomes stubborn skepticism. In reality, science is like any other human activity, and as such, emotions always trump reason. There is as least as much pig-headedness and motivated inattention in science as in politics and religion.

Given the non-rational skeleton, will mainstream science ever be prepared to admit that psychic phenomena warrants serious investigation? I believe the answer is yes. Acceptance someday is inevitable. We are dealing with human experiences reported since the dawn of human history, experiences that do not go away in tightly controlled laboratory tests using the most sophisticated experimental tools and designs. So some of these phenomena will eventually become integrated into the mainstream. Exactly when I cannot say. Perhaps one to five decades.

Will this happen because the accumulated data will overwhelm skepticism? Probably not. As Max Planck, the physicist who dreamt up the idea of the “quantum” in quantum mechanics, once wrote, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8538/8639629588_4478454f18_b.jpgSome of the 60 participants at the UBC meeting represented that younger generation, and while a handful of the older crowd are certain to remain mulishly skeptical to their deaths, based on the written opinions of many of the participants collected before, during and after the meeting, it was clear that the majority were more open to anomalous cognition after the meeting than they were before.

I expect that trend to continue, and then one day a threshold will be crossed, and on that day some of the invisible gorillas in our midst will become a bit easier to see. The very next day no one will remember that this topic was once considered controversial.

 

 

DEAN RADIN. PhD, is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychology at Sonoma State University. Before joining the research staff at IONS in 2001, he held appointments at AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, and SRI International, where he worked on a classified program investigating psychic phenomena for the US government. He is author or coauthor of over 200 technical and popular articles, a dozen book chapters, and three books including the award-winning The Conscious Universe (HarperOne, 1997), Entangled Minds (Simon & Schuster, 2006), and most recently, Supernormal (Random House, 2013).

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 112 (January-February 2009)
© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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