The realm of the impossible

An article appeared in the July/August issue of the Skeptical Inquirer which, on first glance, you might expect me to agree with entirely.

It's entitled "Why Parapsychological Claims Cannot Be True," and is written by Arthur S. Reber and James E. Alcock, professors of psychology at (respectively) Brooklyn College and York University.  What Reber and Alcock are attempting to show is that physical law proves that claims of extrasensory perception and the like are theoretically impossible.

Reber and Alcock cite four tenets of physics that they say render parapsychological claims untenable:

1. Causality -- all effects have definite causes that preceded them.
2. Time's arrow -- the flow of time is one-directional, although its speed may vary from reference frame to reference frame.
3. Thermodynamics -- energy cannot be created or destroyed, so parapsychological claims (such as the future influencing the present) require energy transfer that breaks the First Law.
4. The inverse-square law -- the strength of a signal diminishes as a function of the square of the distance, and no such attenuation of signal strength is reported in cases of (for example) telepathy.

Certainly, these are powerful objections to many claims of parapsychology, and anyone who says (s)he has such abilities needs to have some pretty persuasive evidence backing it up.  But what I object to is that Reber and Alcock equate a claim violating science as we currently understand it with a claim being impossible even in the broadest theoretical sense.  Based on this, they say, all parapsychological claims should be dismissed out of hand.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons, John Stephen Dwyer, PsychicBoston, CC BY-SA 3.0]

There are a number of problems with this conflation.  The first is that physics itself suggests some awfully bizarre things -- witness Saturday's post about two spaceships being in a state of superposition where both of them are destroyed and not destroyed simultaneously, an outcome that appears to be entirely consistent with what we know about quantum theory and general relativity.  Simultaneity was shown to be inconsistent between reference frames decades ago; one of the more bizarre outcomes of Einstein's discoveries is that two events that appear simultaneous in one frame might appear sequential in another, raising questions about what exactly we mean by "causality."  (And that's not even considering such loony -- but theoretically possible -- phenomena as wormholes, connecting two different bits of spacetime.)

The second problem, though, is the assumption that our understanding now is going to turn out to be true ten years (or even ten days) from now, and will apply equally well to every new discovery.  Consider one of their examples -- the inverse-square law.  It is true that many physical phenomena drop in magnitude as a function of the inverse square of the distance.  (These include light intensity, radiation, gravitational force, electromagnetic force, and sound volume.)  But it was recently discovered that gravitational waves don't decrease in intensity with the square of the distance; they decrease inversely simply with the distance.  The power of a radar signal diminishes with the distance of the source raised to the fourth power.  Up to a distance of one femtometer, the strong nuclear force doesn't vary with distance at all, and after that it drops to nearly zero.

So saying that physics demonstrates that all information transmission follows an inverse-square law simply isn't true, and even if you ignore the handful of counterexamples known, it also implies some significant hubris -- that any subsequent discoveries we make will automatically conform to what we already know.

What is at the root of this is a confusion between what is improbable and what is impossible.  I would argue that there's very little in the latter category -- even such written-in-stone laws such as the speed of light being the ultimate universal speed limit have been subject to thus-far unresolved questions (consider, for example, the Alcubierre warp drive, a solution to Einstein's field equations that appears to allow apparent hyperlight speeds).  As you move along the continuum from improbable to impossible, the demand for rigorous and high-quality evidence quite rightly increases (Carl Sagan's "ECREE" principle -- "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence").  This is why it might take a lot to move me into the "true believer" column with respect to parapsychological claims, but am quite content to remain in the "undecided" column indefinitely.

As befits a good skeptic.

But no matter where you are along the continuum, you can never rule out what the next round of discoveries might uncover.  As Einstein remarked (although it may well be apocryphal) -- "A thousand experiments could never prove me right, but one could prove me wrong."

There are a good many other objections to Reber's and Alcock's argument.  One which I'll mention briefly, but which for a fuller explication you should go to the source, was outlined by Ian Wardell in his blog Philosophical Thoughts.  The gist of his rebuttal is that parapsychological claims all hinge on issues of consciousness, and we still don't have any explanation of a mechanism by which consciousness occurs -- so how can we say with confidence what its limitations are?

Again, I'm not arguing for parapsychological claims, and regular readers of Skeptophilia know all too well that I'm pretty dubious about a lot of the specific evidence these claims rest on.  But my doubt about particular bits of psi doesn't imply anything categorical about the possibility of those sorts of phenomena in general, any more than my demonstration that a purported Bigfoot femur came from a bear would mean that Bigfoot doesn't exist anywhere in time and space.

Such examples of scientific hubris always remind me of the famous quote from Lord Kelvin, one of the pre-eminent scientists of the late 19th and early 20th century, who said in 1907, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.  All that remains is more and more precise measurement."  Within twenty years of that statement, Robert Millikan showed that photons exist in discrete quanta of energy; Einstein published his paper on the general theory of relativity; Louis-Victor de Broglie showed that matter has wavelike properties; Heisenberg demonstrated the bizarrely counterintuitive uncertainty principle; and Schrödinger wrote his famous wave equation governing the role of probability in quantum phenomena.

And we're still trying to figure out the fallout from all of that stuff.

So as far as Reber and Alcock go; I'm not quite the instantaneous ally you might have expected.  My general feeling is that any time you start talking about something being theoretically impossible, world without end amen, you're skating out onto some seriously thin ice.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to my heart; the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  In The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu takes an interesting angle on this question; if intelligent life were discovered in the universe -- maybe if it even gave us a visit -- how would humans react?

Liu examines the impact of finding we're not alone in the cosmos from political, social, and religious perspectives, and doesn't engage in any pollyanna-ish assumptions that we'll all be hunky-dory and ascend to the next plane of existence.  What he does think might happen, though, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves you pondering our place in the universe for days after you turn over the last page.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Notes from the other side

Dear Readers:

I'm going to take a short break, for the rest of the week -- but I'll be back next Monday, November 26, so keep sending me links and ideas!

cheers,

Gordon

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A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that I knew was going to be good even before I opened it, because it was from a site called Daily Vibes.  First, one of my pet peeves is the way people use words like "vibration" and "frequency" to basically mean "any damn thing we want," and I figured the "vibes" part presaged a lot of that sort of thing.  But I was even more excited when I perused their home page and saw a list of recent articles, which include the following:

• "What Does Your Zodiac Sign Reveal About Your Innermost Thoughts?"
• "How You Sit Can Reveal Your Personality"
• "Five Gemstones Traditionally Used to Clear Negative Energies"
• "Five Ways Crying Makes You Stronger"
• "Have You Seen a Feather Tattoo?  Here's What It Can Mean"

So I started reading the various posts, and very quickly ran into a troubling problem: what if your zodiac sign says basically the opposite of what you learn from how you sit?  Because I found that the way I like to sit means I'm outgoing, dynamic, dress well, have high goals and aspirations, and have a difficult time taking criticism.  My zodiac sign, on the other hand, says that I'm mysterious, aloof, and secretive, hard to get to know, and very moody.  So am I both?  Or somewhere in the middle?  Because right now, I'm confused as to whether I should smile and schmooze with people, or wear a black cloak and just give people a meaningful raised eyebrow to make them uncomfortable.

Then I had to give a look at the one about crying, because I'm one of those people who is very easy to launch into a complete tear-o-rama.  My wife was at an art show this past weekend, so Saturday evening I decided to sit on the couch with my dog, drinking wine and watching Dr. Who.  I rewatched one of my favorite episodes, "The Girl in the Fireplace," and ended up hugging my dog and sobbing into my wine glass.

Okay, it's a pretty sad episode, but geez.  I mean, it's not like it's the first time I've seen it, or anything, so you'd think I'd have been somewhat immunized.  But no.  There I sat, blubbering like an idiot.

At least my dog understood.

Anyhow, I was curious about what Daily Vibes had to say about crying, and I was heartened to find out that because I cry a lot, I don't care what other people think about me, and I'm brave.  I also learned that crying "relieves stress and pent-up emotions... [removing] negative emotions and [instilling] positive ones."  In that respect, we're told, "it's almost as effective as sex."

So next time your significant other is feeling amorous, you should turn to them and say, "Not now, honey, I think I'd prefer to have a nice long cry instead."

Oh, and if you have a feather tattoo, you're "strong, independent, courageous, and cherish freedom."

Anyhow, all of this is sort of beside the point, because the article that my friend sent me the link to was none of the above, but was to a post called "Five Signs Your Deceased Love Ones Are Trying to Help You."

Naturally, I was curious about what they thought were signs that Grandma Bertha was still hanging around, and I suspect you are, too, so without further ado:

1.  Animals Acting Strangely.

If this were true, it would mean my house has been continuously haunted for years, because in my experience my pets act strangely all the time.  For example, I went outside this summer because our coonhound, Lena, was having a complete barking fit, dancing around yapping like mad.  I thought she had a possum cornered, but no.  When I came up to her, I found out she was barking at...

... a stick.

To be fair, it was a pretty ferocious-looking stick.  But still.

2.  Poltergeist Activity.

I hear bumps and creaks and knocks in our house all the time, but I think that's mostly because (1) it's an old house, and (2) there's a family of squirrels that we have been unable to evict from our attic.  I haven't seen anything else really suspicious on this front, so this one would have to be in the "no" column for me.

On the other hand...

3.  Electronics Acting Up.

I am halfway convinced that my mere presence makes computers malfunction.  My school computer, for example, frequently and unpredictably decides to draw little gray Xs on all of my document icons, and the only solution is to restart the computer, which takes fifteen minutes because this particular machine is powered by a single hamster running in a wheel.  It's kind of a relief to find out this is caused by ghosts, because I was beginning to think I'm just a techno-idiot.

4.  Vivid Dreams.

This one is also in the "yes" column for me.  Last night I woke up in the middle of the night because I was dreaming that I was defending our back yard from a flock of very threatening owls.  So my dreams tend to not be just "vivid," but "really fucking weird."  And if this is Grandma Bertha's fault, I wish she'd lay off, because I need my sleep.

5.  Extrasensory Perception.

For this one, the site says, "ESP is a pretty wide umbrella in terms of definition. It can mean a bunch of different things.  But in this case, it’s as if the spirits in our lives put ideas in our heads before we can have them."

Well, I'm always coming up with strange ideas, which is why I'm an author, because I can write out bizarre ideas that pop into my head and people pay me to read about them.  But I don't think that's ESP.  It may be, as one of my friends once speculated, because I was dropped on my head as a baby.

So the checklist for whether my house is haunted generates mixed results, which I suppose is to be expected.  Myself, I think it's not haunted, although my younger son swears that he's seen a shadowy figure out of the corner of his eye, moving about in our basement.  Maybe that's Grandma Bertha, I dunno.  If it is, I wish she'd stop simply oozing about the place and do something useful, like telling me her chocolate fudge recipe, which I've tried unsuccessfully for years to reproduce.

But I need to wrap this up, because I have to go see what Lena's barking at.  Maybe it's another stick that is attempting to launch a vicious attack on her.  You know how it goes.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Mary Roach's Spook.  Roach is combines humor with serious scientific investigation, and has looked into such subjects as sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), war (Grunt), and food (Gulp).  (She's also fond of hilarious one-word titles.)

In Spook, Roach looks at claims of the afterlife, and her investigation takes her from a reincarnation research facility in India to a University of Virginia study on near-death experiences to a British school for mediums.  Along the way she considers the evidence for and against -- and her ponderings make for absolutely delightful reading.

Ground state

Are you bothered by your psychic abilities?  Do you find yourself unable to tune out others' thoughts?   Is the color of your aura clashing with your favorite shirt?

Maybe you need to do some psychic grounding.

Honestly, I can imagine that it might be inconvenient to be psychic, if such things actually existed. Especially if you were telepathic.  Consider what it would be like if you really could read the minds of the people around you.  I don't know about you, but my mind is a continuous jumble of random thoughts, most of them inane, weird, and/or irrelevant.  There is frequently musical accompaniment, usually consisting of whatever song I heard on the radio on the way to work.  And like most people, I also often have thoughts that I hope fervently never leave my skull, because of the sheer embarrassment potential.  If my thoughts really could be recorded, sequentially, they'd probably sound something like the following:

"I'm hungry...  What did I do with my pencil?...  Do I have a faculty meeting tomorrow?...  Slip slidin' away, slip slidin' away...  Wow, she's really hot!...  Is 'occurred' spelled with one 'r' or two?...  I'm cold...  Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia, let me go...  Did I remember to remind Carol to pick up dog food today?...  Geez, that guy is wearing a dorky-looking hat..."

And so on.  I would think that being telepathic would be at best highly distracting, and at worst the mental equivalent of being trapped 24/7 in a noisy bar.  (A feature I worked into one of my characters -- the telepathic detective Callista Lee, in Poison the Well, due for release next month.)  I know that there are people I have to interact with on a daily basis that I already want to scream "dear god, will you please just shut up!" at, and that's just from hearing what they say out loud.  If I could hear their thoughts, too... well, let me just say that this could well be at the heart of some seemingly unpremeditated homicides.

Be that as it may, if this is you... help is on the way, in the form of the aforementioned article, which was written by someone who signs his name only as "Nathaniel." 

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The gist of shutting down your psychic abilities lies, apparently, in "grounding" yourself.  Nathaniel says that you can do this in the following ways:

1. Stop noticing weird stuff. Nathaniel refers to this as the "11:11 effect" -- how you notice when a digital clock reads some time that is peculiar, and once you've noticed it, it jumps out at you every time it happens.  He seems to seriously consider this a psychic ability, and in fact says that training yourself to notice such things more is a way to amplify your abilities if you want them to increase. 
2. Tell yourself you're not going to be psychic any more, until you say otherwise.  It's important to include the last part, because if you don't you could risk losing your abilities permanently.
3. Don't give psychic readings for yourself or others, and don't mess with "power objects" like crystals or Tarot cards.
4. Create a "psychic shield" for yourself to stop negative people from throwing destructive stuff at you.  There's a site that tells you all about how to do this, but I must admit that I still don't see how this could work, as it seems like all it amounts to is visualizing yourself as surrounded by a shield.  Whether this could help with negative aura energies, or whatever, I don't know, but I suspect it might be less than successful if what the negative person had thrown was, for example, a brick.

So anyway, all of this seems to me like a lot of hooey -- if it really was this easy to gain and lose psychic abilities, all of us would be doing it all the time, constantly picking up each other's thoughts, and I would really have to watch myself when I see Really Hot Girl or Dorky Hat Guy.  Just as with last week's post on weird coincidences, most of what Nathaniel is describing is just wishful thinking, combined with dart-thrower's bias -- the tendency all of us have to notice seemingly odd stuff (such as when the clock reads 11:11) and ignore irrelevant background noise (such as when it says 5:48).  Our attention to such things doesn't make us psychic -- all it reflects is that evolutionarily, it's better to give attention to something that turns out to be unimportant than to ignore something that turns out to be critical to our survival.

So, honestly, I found Nathaniel's advice to be a bit of a disappointment.  I'd hoped for more concrete advice -- something along the lines of, "To avoid picking up the thoughts of those around you, fashion yourself a tinfoil hat.  Make sure that you use at least three layers for best effect, especially if you are using the cheap generic shit and not genuine Reynolds Wrap."  But maybe it's better that way. If I had to go around all day with a tinfoil hat, I'd be the one people were thinking "dorky" about -- even if, at the time, my "psychic shield" was keeping me from hearing about it.

Echoes of the future

A couple of days ago, a reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a website that has a compilation of research purporting to show reverse causality -- that the future can influence the past.  More specifically, it describes experiments using random number generators that are alleged to show statistical deviations from randomness shortly before major world events (such as the 2004 Indonesian tsunami).

The website calls this effect retropsychokinesis -- that somehow, people's reactions in the future are reaching backwards and influencing past events.  The person who sent me the link accompanied it with the questions, "What do you make of this?  Can there be anything to this?"

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I spent a couple of hours pawing through the links on the website, and my general reaction is: "not much" and "I don't think so."

My first reaction whenever anyone makes a claim like this is to say, "Show me the mechanism."  If you think that our global consciousness (whatever that means) can alter streams of random numbers generated in the past, then explain to me how that could work.  As far as I can see from the website, any explanations are pretty thin, usually falling back on some vague allusions to quantum indeterminacy:

The existence of this effect (if in fact it does exist) raises some very deep questions concerning the nature of time, the relationship between consciousness and objective material reality, the concept of causality, and the concept of randomness.  The much misunderstood "multiple (or parallel) universes" interpretation of quantum mechanical phenomena has been suggested as part of a model which encompasses the RPK phenomenon.  This in itself raises many important questions.  The idea of "will" is certainly related, as this is the best existing description of that which the subject uses in order to exert an influence.

The second thing, however, is to ask why -- if (for example) some kind of Disturbance in the Force prior to the 2004 tsunami altered the ordinary chain of causality -- the best it could do is to disturb some random number generators.  Seems like if there is an effect (or a cause, or whatever you'd call this), there'd be a bigger result.

Such as an awareness that a disaster was about to happen, allowing people to seek higher ground in time.

But the biggest problem is the quality of the evidence.  Dick Bierman, a RPK apologist, has a statistical analysis of the deviations that have been reported, and the results (according to Topher Cooper), are pretty earthshattering.  "The odds of this sum being this large is one chance in 630 thousand million (what us Yanks call 630 billion)," Cooper says.  "I would say that he [Bierman] was not exaggerating when he said that this is pretty strong evidence that 'something' (other than the null hypothesis) 'is going on'."

Cooper only alludes to the problem with all of this near the end of his analysis.  After going through how amazing the evidence all is he adds, with apparent reluctance, "Whether that 'something' is something interesting (e.g., paranormal) depends on an analysis of the tightness of the experimental protocols."

And therein lies the main problem with this.  Most of the experiments cited in the website, and analyzed by Bierman and Cooper, were run by one Helmut Schmidt.  Schmidt spent his entire life trying to establish proof of the paranormal, and extrasensory perception in particular, and his results are generally considered to be flawed.  As James Alcock wrote in The Skeptical Enquirer:

Schmidt’s claim to have put psi on a solid scientific footing garnered considerable attention, and his published research reported very impressive p values.  In my own extensive review of his work, I concluded that Schmidt had indeed accumulated impressive evidence that something other than chance was involved (Alcock 1988).  However, I found serious methodological errors throughout his work that rendered his conclusions untenable, and the “something other than chance” was attributable to methodological flaws.

Blunter still was the assessment by Victor Stenger, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii:

Olshansky and Dossey argue that quantum mechanics provides a physical basis for retroactive prayer.  They refer to experiments by Helmut Schmidt in which humans attempt to mentally affect radioactive decays, which are inherently quantum events.  While Schmidt claims positive results, his experiments also lack adequate statistical significance and have not been successfully replicated in the thirty-five years since his first experiments were reported.

So predictably I'm unimpressed.  It's not that reverse causality not an intriguing idea; something like it was the genesis of my novel Lock & Key, not to mention the plots of about a dozen episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

But all of those have in common that they're fiction.  If you're expecting me to buy that such a thing has a basis in reality, I'm going to need a little more than some questionable (and apparently unreplicable) experiments with random number generators.

Contacting the spirits of the... living?

One of the most important, and least considered, questions about belief is, "What would it take to convince you that you were wrong?"

It is something we should always keep in the front of our brains, whenever considering a claim.  We all have biases; we all have preconceived notions.  These only become a problem when either (1) they are unexamined, or (2) we become so attached to them that nothing could persuade us to abandon them.

I'm very much afraid that for some people, belief in the power of psychics is one of those unexamined, immovable ideas.  I say this because of the response people have had to a catastrophic faceplant performed last week by Skeptophilia frequent flier "Psychic Sally" Morgan.

"Psychic Sally," you may remember, is the performance artist who has thousands of people convinced that she can communicate with the dead.  She bills herself as "Britain's favorite medium," and fills halls with people who have purchased expensive tickets to her shows.  This is despite the fact that in a previous show she was caught "communicating" with a fictional character, and was once accused by a journalist of receiving information from a helper through an earpiece.

None of this diminished her popularity.  The first incident was only revealed in a newspaper article after the fact, and in the second, the journalist was actually sued by Psychic Sally for libel -- and she won.  There was no proof, the judge ruled, that the Sally had cheated.  The journalist, and the newspaper he worked for, were forced to pay reparations.

But this time it is to be hoped that things are different, because Sally did her monumental kerflop right in public.  Here's how blogger Myles Power, who was there that night, describes it:

Sally came to Middlesbrough on Friday night and her show started off very well.  Even though she was getting the vast majority of what she was saying wrong the audience did not seem to mind and seemed to be having a good time.  The point at which the audience became disillusioned with the performance was quite specific.  One aspect of the show is that audience members can submit photographs of dead loved ones, in the hope that Sally will select theirs, and give a psychic reading from it.  Sally pulled out of a box on stage one of these pictures.  She held the picture up to the camera and it was projected on the large screen behind her.  The picture was of a middle-aged woman and by the clothes she was wearing and the quality of the image, I guessed it was taken some time in the 1990s.  Sally immediately began to get communications from beyond the grave from a man holding a baby named Annabel……or was it Becky.  Noticing that no one in the audience was responding, Sally asked the person who submitted the photo to stand up.  A rather small chunky woman at the centre of the hall stood up and Sally once again began to get messages from the afterlife.  She was informed that this man and baby were somehow linked to the lady in the picture.  However the woman in the audience (who was now also projected behind Sally) disagreed and started to look increasingly confused as, presumably, nothing Sally was saying made any sense to her.  Sally then decided to flat out ask her if the woman in the picture had any children who passed and, when informed that that she hadn’t, responded by saying “I will leave that then.” 

Sally then became in direct contact with the woman in the photo who began to tell her that there was a lot of confusion around her death and that she felt it was very very quick.  She later went on to say that the day Wednesday has a specific link to her death and that she either died on a Wednesday or was taken ill that day.  As the woman in the audience was not responding to any thing Sally was saying, she decided to ask how the woman in the photo was related to her.  It turns out the woman in the audience got the whole concept of submitting a picture of someone you wanted to talk to from the afterlife completely wrong – and for some unknown reason submitted a younger picture of herself.

So there you have it.  "Psychic Sally" has now been caught not only summoning up the spirit of a fictional character, she has gotten into psychic communication with the ghost of a person who is still alive and sitting right there in the audience.

Apparently the hall erupted in laughter when it became evident what had happened, and Psychic Sally never really did recover.  A number of people walked out.  People wouldn't answer her leading questions.  The audience, for that night at least, was a lost cause.

But here's the problem: now we have people rising to her defense, and the defense of psychics as a whole.  Just because Sally got it wrong once, they say, doesn't mean all psychics are frauds.  Here's a sampling of comments:

I know many genuine psychics who are sincere and good people, there are bad plumbers, carpenters etc just as there are good.  I was talking to a person who makes a living by speaking to the dead every week, he was a VICAR if you don’t believe fine but do not decry those who do as you will find out the truth one day as we all do.  The Sally Morgans and tub-thumping stage acts do no service to the genuine ones who just help without rooking people, she was so bad one night according to a TV comedian that they were booing her the following night when he was on.

I get really pee’d off when all people want to do is bad mouth sally make her look like she is some sort of fraudulant [sic] psychic.  Why do people only ever mention that she get names wrong n [sic] so on.  Sally has been doing this since she was 5 yrs old, and she has done show after show how bout [sic] talking about all the messages she has got spot on?  because they would out rule all the messages she may/or may not have got right.  I think personally people forget that because she mentions a name to someoone [sic] & they dont [sic] know who she is talking about that name could relate to a friend who is sitting at home & where they dont [sic] know there friends [sic] extended family it could have been for them, so it’s not that sally gets it wrong its simply because the person who the message is for is not simply sat in the audience.  Also this is not something sally can take a wild guess at, she is being given information from the other side & some people find that hard to except [sic].  Sally time & time again gives actual names of the person she has in spirit & gives names of that persons [sic] family you tell me how sally could have known this or is making it up?

THERE WAS PLANTS IN THE AUDIENCE, CAST NEGATIVE ENERGY ONTO SALLY, THAT IS WHY THE PEOPLE DO NOT SEE THE TRUTH BECAUSE THEY DRINK WATER FROM THE TOWN TAPS WITH HAS FLURECENCE [sic] IN IT TO CONTROL THE MINDS OF THE PEOPLE AND MAKE THEM THING THINGS THAT ARE NOT TRUE. 

what no-one seems to have realised that psychics do not necessarily work with or communicate with spirit – all mediums are psychic but not all psychics are mediums – there is a big difference!

Okay, that was terrifying.  Especially the part about "flurecence" in the water.

Really, people: if "Psychic Sally," one of the most sought-after mediums in the UK, fails this catastrophically, shouldn't that force you to revisit your assumptions vis-à-vis all psychic phenomena?  I mean, think about it; what if there was a televised launch of a rocket, and right there in the public eye, said rocket went up into space and ran smack into one of the "crystal spheres" that ancient astronomers thought made up the heavens?  Wouldn't that make you want to ask the astronomers a few trenchant questions?

But with Psychic Sally's analogous bellyflop, apparently the answer is "no."  With the exception of the few people who actually saw her epic fail, no one much seems to be convinced who wasn't convinced already.  My guess is that after a few weeks of laying-low, she'll dust herself off -- and her act will be right back out on stage, wowing gullible audiences and raking in the money.

The hair apparent

Just recently, there's been a claim making the rounds of social media sites by virtue of the "Forward," "Repost," and "Share" functions.  The original seems to have been written about a year and a half ago, but for some reason it's really been circulating in the last few weeks, which is odd given that it is composed of pure, unadulterated, USDA-Grade-A bullshit.

The claim?  That you shouldn't cut your hair (that includes facial hair, guys), because it's an "extension of your nervous system."

Naturally, we have to begin the whole thing with allegations that this critical information has been covered up by the government, because nothing is complete without a hint of conspiracy:

Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hair style is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue. Back in the Viet Nam war however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view. 

We then hear from "Sally" [name changed to protect privacy] whose [unnamed] husband worked as a psychologist for a VA hospital.  He uncovered something really strange in some reports of mysterious "government studies:"

Sally said, “I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from the contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again. What is more, the VA Medical center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example. As I read the documents, I learned why.

It seems that during the Viet Nam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain. They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities. Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.

With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these Indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.

Serious casualities [sic] and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.

When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ‘sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ‘sixth sense’ , their ‘intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ‘read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.

This, we are told, is why "Indians keep their hair long."

But what is the science behind all of this?  Simple, they say; hair is actually a bunch of... nerves:

Each part of the body has highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole. The body has a reason for every part of itself.

Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly-evolved ‘feelers’ or ‘antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.

Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment. This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.

When hair is cut, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment are greatly hampered. This results in ‘numbing-out’.

Right!  Because highly complex cells, with nuclei and other organelles, and an intricate set of transport proteins, that are capable of sending and receiving electrical signals, are exactly the same thing as a bunch of dead strands of keratin.

In one sense -- one very limited sense -- they are correct.  Hairs on the skin do increase its sensitivity, and some animals (cats are an excellent example) use whiskers as tactile sensors.  But the idea that hair is acting as some kind of conduit for psychic energy is ridiculous.

And as for Kirlian photography, of course you get a different image if you remove someone's hair.  Kirlian photography is just a method for photographing the static electrical discharge from something (or someone) when you subject it (or him) to a high voltage at low current (the equivalent of a bad carpet shock).  Have you ever seen photographs of people who are holding on to a Van de Graaff generator?

This photograph would look completely different if she was bald.

And I suspect that the Dalai Lama might disagree with the statement that guys who are bald are "numbed out."

As for me, I have had long hair.  Really long, at one point in my life, like down to the middle of my back.  I also, at one point, had facial hair.  I did not notice a bit of difference in my Sensitivity To External Stimuli the day I simultaneously had my pony tail cut off, (and in fact, got what was damn near to a buzz cut) and shaved off all of my facial hair.  Mostly what I noticed is that getting ready for work in the morning took drastically less time, my head was cooler when the weather was hot, and I didn't have to deal with unmanageable snarls on windy days.  But I was no more in tune with "the Sixth Sense" when I had long hair than I am now (i.e. not at all), despite what all of the vague, uncited "government studies" allegedly show.

So that's our dose of pseudoscience for this morning.  Leaving your hair long so you can pick up, and broadcast, psychic signals.  I'd like to say that this will be the end of the discussion, but that may be a forlorn hope given that this article seems to be making the rounds (one Facebook link to it I saw had been "liked" over 5,000 times, and had hundreds of comments).  Be that as it may, I'm done discussing it, because I need to go take a shower and wash my nerve endings.

Psychic cat energy clearing services

A frequent reader of Skeptophilia complained to me a couple of days ago that he might need to stop reading my blog, because every time he did, his blood pressure spiked out of sheer indignation at the level of idiocy that some humans are capable of.  "You either need to stop making so much sense," he wrote to me, "or you have to start blogging about kittens."

Be careful what you wish for.

Figure 1:  A kitten.

Prompted by his comment, and with a little bit of research, I discovered the page, "Psychic Cats Are Probably More Common Than Other Psychic Animals," which launches us off onto our topic for today.

The author of the page starts us out with a good question, to wit: How can we know that cats are psychic?  The answer comes in two parts: (1) because we own cats, and they sure seem psychic to us; and (2) the ancient Egyptians liked cats a lot.  Also, we have the inarguable fact that cats are nocturnal:

Then there's the long association of cats with witches as their 'familiars'. Actually, witches had a whole range of 'familiars', but it is only the cats which are remembered.  Cats go out at night and roam around in the moonlight.  In other words, cats are 'different'. They have something which sets them apart.

Actually, I see way more possums out at night than I do cats, and I don't think that anyone is arguing that possums are psychic.  But there were no Ancient Egyptian Possum Gods, so maybe that's the difference.

In any case, these folks are really invested in cats being psychic because they have a business in "geomancy," which is figuring out through ESP if a location has negative or positive Quantum Energy Frequency Vibrations, and then "clearing" it of any bad ones so that the negative energies won't infest your aura.  Or something like that.  It's hard to tell, frankly, because most of their explanations sound like this:

Sometimes saying that we do earth energy healing is a shorthand way of saying that we work with a variety of different energies.  If you have read some of the other pages on this site, you will realize that there are a variety of different energies to be found in any environment. Therefore, to say that geomancy or space clearing is only involved in earth energy healing is somewhat misleading.  Obviously (I hope!), you will recognize the need to keep your environment clear of those energies which can affect you negatively.

Oh!  Sure!  That makes it completely clear!  I mean, my only question would be, "What?"

At this point, you may be wondering what the cats have to do with it.  I know I was.  The whole cat angle comes from the fact that you can apparently use your cat to figure out which parts of your house have bad energies:

Energetically speaking, cats tend to be drawn to places noxious to humans. Therefore, they can be useful indicators of such areas, simply by observing them.  However, they also appear, from what we have been discovering with our own cats, that they also act as transformers of negative energy in some fashion.  As we became more and more involved in house clearing, and tackled more and more difficult places, so we found that our cats are of greater help.  For instance, they sit with us, or on the plan of the place we are working on and wander away when we are finished.

I can say with some degree of assurance that from observing my own cats, Puck and Geronimo, "sitting around looking bored" and then "wandering away to be bored elsewhere" are both activities at which they excel.  It also bears mention, however, that my cats are not exactly your textbook Fluffy Kitty:

Figure 2: What neither of my cats looks even remotely like.

Puck's physical appearance makes her look like she's got a screw loose, an impression which is helped out by the fact that she's got one broken fang and frequently walks around with her tongue sticking part way out.  She's really quite a sweet-natured cat, but even people who like cats think she looks slightly demented.  Geronimo, on the other hand, is generally pissed off at the entire world.  Sometimes he just sits there and stares at me, his yellow eyes narrowed to slits.  It's unnerving.  He would have made a good witch's familiar, if he had been able to find a witch who was in his league, evil-wise, which would have been a challenge.

Oh, and did I mention that both of these cats are black?  I'm sure that's relevant, somehow.

The "Psychic Cats" page ends with a question, which certainly seems like a good one:

If cats are attracted to your house, to you and you have many of them, you need to look at why that is. Is it because they are protecting you?

To which I can only answer: if you think that your cats are protecting you, you might want to ask yourself who you would rather have by your side if an armed burglar broke into your house -- Brutus the Rottweiler, or Mr. Fluffums the Persian Cat?

So anyhow, I'm pretty sure that my cats aren't psychic.  For one thing, if they actually were psychic, I doubt they'd let our neurotic border collie, Doolin, push them around.  Plus, I'm guessing that they'd use mind-control to get something better than dry cat food for dinner.  And as far as being "drawn to places that are noxious to humans," Geronimo's favorite spot is on top of our hot tub.  So unless somehow the hot tub has become a Reservoir Of Negative Energy, I'm thinking that he's only sitting there because it's warm.  The upshot of it all is that in my experience, cats are kind of useless.  They're sort of like home decor items that run up vet bills and poop in a box in the corner of the laundry room.

So, that's our in-depth analysis of feline psychics.   And to the reader who wanted a kitten post, I hope you're satisfied at what you've done.  I suspect I've just unleashed a torrent of hate mail from (1) people who love cats and resent my criticizing them, (2) people who believe in psychic abilities and resent my poking fun at them, and (3) people who own psychic cats and simply hate my guts.  But it's a risk I'm willing to take.  As a blogger, you have to be responsive to your readers.  Even given the criticism I sometimes get, they're still an easier audience than Geronimo, who looks like he would happily claw my eyes out even though I feed him every day.

Mechanisms, cognitive bias, premonitions, and telepathy

I have a cognitive bias.  When I come across a new phenomenon, and am trying to wrap my brain around it, I need to understand the mechanism by which it works.  If no mechanism is forthcoming, this raises (considerably) the level of evidence I demand before I'll accept that what I'm seeing is real.

I realize that this is, in many ways, getting the cart before the horse.  Rarely in science do researchers discover something, and understand the mechanism by which it works, simultaneously.  Almost always we start out by making some sort of observation that requires explaining, and describe the what of the phenomenon long before anyone is able to give a good explanation of its how.

The problem is that given this bias, this automatically makes me doubt studies that show results that don't seem to have any reasonable mechanism by which they could have occurred.  I'm aware that this could be potentially preventing me from accepting evidence that would be convincing in any other realm, a position hardly befitting a skeptic -- but in my own defense, at least I'm aware of it.

This brings us to today's bit of possibly scientific weirdness -- two studies, just released in the past week, that allege a factual basis for ESP.

The first one, done by a team led by Julia Mossbridge, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, apparently gives support to the contention that some people experience premonitions.  Mossbridge and her associates analyzed the results of 26 psychological studies, some dating back as far as 1978, looking for evidence that people were experiencing emotional reactions to information they hadn't seen yet.  Subjects were shown photographs that varied in content -- some neutral, some pleasant, some disturbing, some sexually arousing -- and they experienced physiological changes (alterations in electroconductivity of the skin, blood vessel dilation, pupil dilation, EEG readings, and so on) two to ten seconds prior to being shown the relevant photograph.  Mossbridge claims that she has controlled for factors such as the Clever Hans Effect, and has stated, "These results could not be explained by experimenter bias in the normal sense."  Her statistical analysis has placed the odds of the results being due to chance or coincidence at 400 billion to one.

My problem, predictably, is that I don't see how this could possibly work.  I don't see a mechanism.  If you're asking me to believe Mossbridge's results come from some sort of real phenomenon at work, it seems to reverse the temporal order of causality -- placing the effect before the cause.  Causality seems to me to be one of those rock-solid ideas, about which there can't be any reasonable doubt.  But then, that's just all part of my bias, isn't it?

The second study is even sketchier.  In it, a group of neuroscientists from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences went to Bangalore, India, to do an fMRI on a gentleman who claimed to be telepathic.  In the study, one of the experimenters drew a picture, and simultaneously a control subject and the alleged telepath tried to reconstruct the drawing while inside the fMRI machine.  The telepath created a drawing that had a "striking similarity to the original drawn by the experimenter;" the non-telepathic control's drawing had no resemblance at all.  More interestingly, the fMRI results showed increased activity in the alleged telepath's right parahippocampal gyrus, and no such increase occurred in the control.

This one activates my skepti-senses not only because of my bias against anything for which I can't see a possible mechanism; I also wonder why such a stunning result wasn't published anywhere but the International Journal of Yoga.  But let's pass over that, and attribute that to the known biases that grant funding agencies and peer-reviewed science journals have against anything that smacks of woo-woo.  So even assuming that the study was valid, how on earth could such a thing as telepathy work?  What you're telling me is that somehow, as I draw a picture, my thoughts are creating a change in the electromagnetic field surrounding my head, and you (ten feet away) experience that through the neural connections in your right parahippocampal gyrus, and this makes your visual cortex fire, making you suddenly realize that I'd just drawn a picture of a kitty cat?

I'm just not seeing how this could possibly work.  You'd think that any changes in the electromagnetic field in my vicinity caused by my brain activity would be so weak as to be undetectable at that distance -- especially given that the test subject was inside the giant electromagnets of an fMRI machine at the time!

Of course, many believers in telepathy don't think it's communicated electromagnetically, that there is some sort of "psi field" by which it is transmitted -- but to me, this doesn't explain anything, it just adds one more item to the list of ESP-related phenomena that no one has ever proven to exist.

In any case, the problem is that Mossbridge et al., and the unnamed scientists who fMRI'd the telepath in Bangalore, may well have stumbled upon something that needs explaining.  (Assuming that neither group are hoaxers; I mean no slight to their reputations, but that possibility can never be discounted without consideration.)  If either or both of these results is real, and not a fluke, a hoax, or a statistical artifact, then despite my objection that there seems to be no possible mechanism by which either one could work, we have some serious explaining to do.

But my bias won't be silenced quite so easily.  Despite Mossbridge's claims of a 400 billion to one likelihood against her results being due to chance, and the hard evidence of the fMRI photographs, I just can't bring myself to overturn everything we currently understand about neuroscience, physics, and causality, and throw myself into the Believers' Camp.  I hope, just for the sake of balance, that some scientist or another takes on the challenge of sifting through these studies -- but if I were a betting man, I'd be wagering that neither one will stand up to any kind of rigorous analysis. 

Remotely possible

Everyone has biases.  I beat that point unto death in my Critical Thinking classes; there is no such thing as a completely objective viewpoint.  We all have our implicit assumptions, preconceived notions, and unquestioned attitudes about how the world works -- or how it should work.  The best thing, and perhaps the only thing if you want to think as clearly as possible, is to be aware of those biases and to try not to let them lead you by the nose.

Still, it's hard, sometimes.  Witness my reaction to the article I just read, entitled "Remote Viewers Help Police Solve Murder."

I had hardly clicked on the link before I was already thinking, "Pfft.  Bunch o' malarkey."  That reaction only intensified as I read -- beginning with their definition of "remote viewing:"  "Remote viewing calls for people to look at random numbers and letters and then let their mind wander, during which they will be able to conjure mental images of people, events and places."  My thought was, "Oh, hey, I can do that!  I just call it 'daydreaming.'"

But, of course, that's not what the article meant.  The author goes on to tell the story of Robert Knight, a Las Vegas photographer, who alerted police to the disappearance of his friend, Stephen B. Williams, in 2006.  Knight was unhappy with the progress made by the police in the case, so he enlisted a teacher of remote viewing, Angela Thompson Smith, for help:

He knew Smith as a teacher of remote viewing, and she apparently knew her stuff. From the late 1980s through 1992, she worked with Princeton University’s Engineering Anomalies Research team. She then moved to Boulder City and became research coordinator for the Bigelow Foundation, which engaged in paranormal research for its founder, Robert T. Bigelow, owner of the Budget Suites of America chain and founder of Bigelow Aerospace...  When Knight came to her in 2006, Smith and six remote viewers she had trained went to work. They included a retired airline captain from Henderson; a retired U.S. Air Force nurse from Dayton, Ohio; a civilian Air Force contractor from Texas; a civil engineer from Virginia; a photographer from Baltimore, Md.; and a university librarian from Provo, Utah. Each was given a coordinate — a random series of letters and numbers — on which to focus.

The viewers each did from one to three remote viewing sessions of about an hour each. They were seeking information unknown at the time, working blind with only the random numbers and letters provided by Smith to focus on. Smith began the work with an initial viewing of the missing man, a follow-up viewing of the suspect’s location, then a profile of the suspect. The other viewers helped seek possible accomplices and the location of the suspect after he fled.

The images they gleaned painted a picture of a body in water, perhaps in criss-crossed netting, near Catalina Island off the Southern California coast.

The punchline: that night in his hotel room, Knight saw a news broadcast in which the newscaster mentioned that an unidentified body had been pulled from the Pacific Ocean off Catalina Island.  Knight "knew who it was," and called the morgue the next morning, saying he could identify the body.  Sure enough, it was Williams.  Then Knight said he had more:

Knight’s information went beyond the body identification. He told police about a man named Harvey Morrow, a supposed investment adviser, who had befriended Williams and was investing Williams’ money — a few million dollars — on his behalf.

Investigators looked into it and found that Morrow was stealing Williams’ money. By now, after Williams’ death, Morrow wasn’t to be found.

Knight told detectives that remote viewers believed Morrow had fled to the British Virgin Islands. One of the viewers even sketched a boat with Morrow on board.

Both observations turned out to be accurate.

Clark said Morrow appeared to have no clue he was a suspect. He left the Caribbean for a job as a used car salesman in Montana — for a boss who was a former cop. He Googled Morrow and discovered he was sought for questioning in the Williams homicide.

Morrow was arrested and convicted in November and is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole.

The article ends with a quote from a scientist:

Physicist Hal Puthoff, one of the founders of the government’s Stargate remote viewing program, isn’t taken aback by skeptics.

“People seem to fall into two categories: those who have been intimately involved with the phenomenon and know it works, and those who haven’t and know it can’t,” he said.

Well.  He sure told us, didn't he?

Okay, here's my problem, and I will readily admit that my reaction to all this is based upon my biases that the world works a particular way.  First, I am strongly disinclined to believe in remote viewing, and also telepathy, telekinesis, psychometry, and a variety of other kinds of ESP and action-at-a-distance, because I see no possible mechanism by which they could work.  Despite the undoubtedly excellent credentials of Physicist Hal Puthoff, the mechanisms of energy storage and transfer, the behavior of fields, and so on, are exceedingly well understood by physicists, and if remote viewing et al. are real, they must involve some method of energy transfer that is not only outside of the realm of what we currently understand, but is undetectable by any of the instruments physicists use.  And it's not for want of trying; people have been for years trying to develop some kind of "psi-meter," if for no other reason to win James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge, but without success.

Second, I just can think of too many other plausible explanations for what happened in the Williams case, without any appeal to woo-woo.  I won't go into details, because several of them cast Knight in a pretty unpleasant light, and I've no wish to do that as I have no proof of those, either; my point is not that any particular explanation is correct, but simply that there are a great many other possibilities in this situation that could adequately explain what we know without espousing the view that the remote viewers saved the day.

All of which, I realize, is because of my biases.  I know little about the case except what was presented in the article.  Because of my pre-existing condition -- that I tend to assume that the world operates by the known laws of science unless I'm shown convincing hard evidence otherwise -- I read the entirety of this article with, shall we say, a fairly jaundiced eye, and ended by saying, "Yeah, right.  Still not doing it for me."  It does raise the question of what it would take to convince me... and on that count, perhaps Hal Puthoff is right.  It would take my being "intimately involved in the phenomenon."  In other words, direct evidence.  And for that, I'm still waiting.

Unreality shows

It's amazing how mushy our perception of the word "reality" is.

Just a couple of days ago, I was working out at the gym with a friend, and I noticed that while she was on the treadmill, she was watching a television show that seemed mostly to be composed of heavily made-up women yelling at each other.  After we were done, I asked her what movie she'd been watching, and she looked sheepish and said, "It wasn't a movie.  It was Real Housewives of New Jersey."

After discussing it for a little while, she agreed that the word "Real" in the title might be a misnomer.

We now have dozens of "reality" shows, from Survivor to Jersey Shore to Sister Wives to Celebrity Apprentice.  The women-yelling genre has, apparently, spread from New Jersey, and there are now Real Housewives shows in Miami, Orange County, Atlanta, New York, and Beverly Hills.

The issue, of course, is that none of these shows are "real."  All of them have staged, stylized action, and many of them work under artificial rules ("vote one person off the island every week").  So right from the get-go, it's apparent that their definition of "reality" isn't exactly what you'd find in The Concise Oxford.

And now, to add a further layer of unreality to the whole thing, we have a "reality show" featuring a contest between psychics.  (Source)

A dozen alleged psychics, amongst them "top Scottish medium" June Field, will travel to the Ukraine this summer to to participate in a woo-off.  Every week, the psychics will do their stuff -- do readings, hold seances, channel spirits -- and a panel of judges will eliminate one a week until the World's Best Psychic is the only woo-woo left standing.  (The winner also receives a cash prize of a little over $30,000.)

At this juncture, I should probably mention that one of the judges will be Uri Geller -- the "psychic" whose alleged telekinetic ability so conspicuously failed him on The Tonight Show, when Johnny Carson wouldn't allow him to bring in his own set of pre-prepared spoons to bend.  Geller's excuse, of course, was that Carson's skepticism was "interfering with the atmosphere."

Um, no, Mr. Geller -- you are the one who is claiming to be able to interfere mentally with stuff at a distance, without touching it.  Carson knew it was a fake.

So the whole thing kind of lacks credibility points right from the outset.  Field, however, is tickled by her being chosen to participate, although she told reporters for The Daily Record that she couldn't predict how she was going to do, which is a little ironic, considering.

"I’m keen to do the show for the exposure it will bring but also to prove to the doubters that there’s more to this world than meets the eye," she said.

And how, exactly, will this prove anything?  To anyone who is a real skeptic, a staged, contrived television show, with a panel of judges who (considering the only one of their number mentioned by name) aren't exactly unbiased, won't prove anything except what a huge moneymaker psychic nonsense is.  Given all the hundreds of thousands of dollars that is bilked from the public annually by these people, it's not like we needed a "reality show" to prove that.

So, honestly, I'm certain that this will turn out to be even less real than Real Housewives of New Jersey.  I wonder if there will be scenes of the psychics wearing lots of make up, yelling at each other, or possibly telekinetically pushing each other around and bending up each other's silverware.  Because that might be worth watching just from a comedic standpoint.

ESP (Extra-Sexy Perception)

Daryl Bem, an experimental psychologist of some standing, has an obsession; proving that ESP exists.  He's been at this for decades.  He was one of the researchers who designed the Ganzfeld Experiment back in the 1980s, in which people were placed in sensory deprivation and allegedly could communicate telepathically.  (Other scientists, naturally wishing to see if they could replicate these results, couldn't.)

He's still at it, almost thirty years later, and published a paper last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which he basically says, "Now I've done it!  See?"

Unfortunately for Bem, this piece of research is (1) once again generating results that most other scientists don't consider significant, and (2) may be one of the most unintentionally funny experimental designs I've ever heard.

What he did was to take a bunch of college students, and place them in front of two computer screens.  The students were equipped with sensors that detected which way their eyes were moving.  Then they were shown pairs of photographs on the two screens.  The pairs of photographs were made up of (1) an innocent photograph like a landscape or a puppy, and (2) a photograph of people having sex.  Bem's claim was that based on the eye movements of the students, they anticipated the screen with the erotic photograph "significantly more than fifty percent of the time."

The experiment was repeated with other types of photographic pairings, and no effect was found.

So, if you accept Bem's results -- ESP works, but only if sex is involved.

Bem writes, with an apparent straight face, "The presentiment studies provide evidence that our physiology can anticipate erotic stimuli before they can occur.  Such anticipation would be evolutionarily advantageous for reproduction and survival if the organism could act instrumentally to approach erotic stimuli and avoid negative stimuli."

Sure.  That makes total sense.  If a guy sees a woman making sexual advances toward him, it's gonna help him out if he's ready to rock and roll 0.1 seconds before she is.  Because we all know how slow guys are to get aroused.  Excuse me while I take a momentary break to guffaw.  All of which tells me that whatever he knows about psychology, the guy (1) doesn't understand evolutionary theory, and (2) apparently has never gotten laid.

Bem's paper also describes a variety of other experiments he conducted.  My favorite was one in which he found that studying after a test makes your score better.  Yes, you read that right.  In Bem's words:  "The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words."  I hope my students don't find out about this.  I have a hard enough time getting them to study as it is.

And of course, no woo-woo article would be complete without a mention of quantum physics.  Bem writes, "Those who follow contemporary developments in modern physics, however, will be aware that several features of quantum phenomena are themselves incompatible with our everyday conception of physical reality."

As far as I can tell, this means, "Quantum physics is kinda weird.  ESP is also weird.  Quantum physics is real.  Therefore ESP is real.  Q.E.D."

There's also the problem that other psychologists did a statistical analysis of Bem's results, and found that "the evidence for psi is weak to nonexistent."  Given that this criticism was published in the same issue of JPSP, you have to wonder how Bem's paper got past the peer review process in the first place.

Anyway, Bem claims that his research shows that if ESP exists, (1) it will help you to locate pornography, and (2) allow you to study after you take tests.   All of which explains vividly why his findings would appeal to college students.  If he could add another experiment that showed (3) a method for dowsing for beer, I think he'd be the most popular researcher on US college campuses.