The thoughtographer

Twice a year, a nearby town has a Friends of the Library used book sale that has become justly famous all over the region.  It features a quarter of a million books, runs for three weeks, and raises tens of thousands of dollars.  On the first day -- when the true rarities and collectibles are available -- the line to enter starts to form four hours before the doors open, and stretches all the way around the block.

I'm not quite such a fanatic, but it is still one of the high points of my year.  I've picked up some real gems there.  This year's take included the "cult bestseller" (says so right on the cover), Ghosts: True Encounters With the World Beyond by Hans Holzer, which is massive both in popularity and in actual weight.

If you're at all familiar with the field of parapsychology, you've probably heard of Holzer.  He was one of the principal investigators into the famous Amityville Horror (alleged) haunting.  He wrote over a hundred books, mostly on the supernatural and the occult, and for years taught courses in parapsychology at the New York Institute of Technology.  Throughout his life -- and it was a long one, he died in 2009 at age 89 -- he was a vociferous believer in the paranormal, and equally strident denouncer of skeptics and scoffers.

Still, given my interest in beliefs in the supernatural, picking up a copy of this book for a couple of bucks was irresistible.  I'm glad to say it does not disappoint.  Besides containing hundreds of "true tales of ghosts and hauntings," he's not shy about saying what he thinks about the doubters:

To the materialist and the professional skeptic -- that is to say, people who do not wish their belief that death is the end of life as we know it to be disturbed -- the notion of ghosts is unacceptable.  No matter how much evidence is presented to support the reality of the phenomena, these people will argue against it and ascribe it to any of several "natural" causes.  Delusion or hallucination must be the explanation, or perhaps a mirage, if not outright trickery.  Entire professional groups that deal in the manufacturing of illusions have taken it upon themselves to label anything that defies their ability to reproduce it artificially through trickery or manipulation as false or nonexistent.  Especially among photographers and magicians, the notion that ghosts exist has never been popular.

There's a reason for that last bit, of course.  Photographers and magicians know how easy it is to fool people and create effects that look absolutely real.  It's not a coincidence that perhaps the most famous debunker, James Randi, was a professional stage magician before he dedicated his life to going after people like Sylvia Browne, Peter Popoff, and Uri Geller.

This paragraph (and the many others like it scattered throughout the book) shows that Holzer didn't really understand the definition of the word "skeptic."  Skeptics have the highest regard for evidence; in fact, it's the only thing that really convinces us.  But once it does, that's that.  Skeptics are able to say, "Well, I guess I was wrong, then," and turn on a dime if presented with reliable evidence.  However, that word "reliable" is usually the sticking point.  Holzer's compendium is chock-full of what he considers evidence, but which are either anecdotal accounts by people like "Mary G." and "John S.", or else demonstrations of the supernatural which are clearly explainable from the "natural causes" Holzer scoffs at.

The result is that he uncritically fell for people who were clearly frauds, and afterward staunchly stood by his assessment, a practice that was criticized by an article in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research as "cast(ing) considerable doubt on the objectivity and reliability of his work as a whole."  One of the most egregious examples is his endorsement of the alleged abilities of the man who became known as "The Thoughtographer," Ted Serios.

Serios claimed to be able to use an ordinary camera outfitted with something he called a "gizmo" -- effectively, nothing more than a cardboard tube -- which was then aimed at his forehead.  He then (he said) sent his "thought energy" into the camera, and when the film was developed, it would have an image of what he was thinking about.

Ted Serios in 1967 [Image was released into the Public Domain by photographer Jule Eisenbud]

First, let's see what Holzer has to say about Serios:

A few years ago, Dr. Jules [sic] Eisenbud of the University of Colorado at Denver startled the world with his disclosures of the peculiar talents of a certain Ted Serios, a Chicago bellhop gifted with psychic photography talents.  This man could project images into a camera or television tube, some of which were from the so-called future.  Others were from distant places Mr. Serios had never been to.  The experiments were undertaken under the most rigid test conditions.  They were repeated, which was something the old-line scientists in parapsychology stressed over and over again.  Despite the abundant amount of evidence, produced in the glaring limelight of public attention and under strictest scientific test conditions, some of Dr. Eisenbud's colleagues at the University of Colorado turned away from him whenever he asked them to witness the experiments he was conducting.  So great was the prejudice against anything Eisenbud and his colleagues might find that might oppose existing concepts that men of scientists couldn't bear to find out for themselves.  They were afraid they would have to unlearn a great deal.

What Holzer conveniently fails to mention is that there was a second "gizmo" that Serios required -- a second, smaller tube with a lens at one end.  The other end contained a piece of an old 35-mm film slide, and when the flash went off, the image from the slide was projected right into the camera aperture.  It was small enough to be concealed in the palm of Serios's hand.

A magic trick, in other words.  Sleight-of-hand.

Serios's claims came to the attention of none other than the aforementioned James Randi, who invited Jule Eisenbud, Serios himself, and any other interested parties to come watch him up on stage -- where he replicated Serios's trick flawlessly.  Eisenbud afterward said he was "flabbergasted;" Serios gave a "wan smile" and wouldn't comment.

No mention of that in Holzer's book, either.

Look, I don't really blame Eisenbud for getting suckered; it's not like I wouldn't have been taken in, either.  We've all watched talented stage magicians do their thing and said, in bafflement, "How in the hell...?"  What I do blame Eisenbud for, though, is not pursuing it further -- telling Serios, "Okay, you need a 'gizmo'?  Tell me how it's made, and I'll make one for you -- show me you can do your trick without any props of your own construction."  Now, I also have to admit that working with Serios can't have been easy.  He was clearly mentally ill.  In Nile Root's book Thoughtography, about the Serios case, the author writes: 

Ted Serios exhibits a behavior pathology with many character disorders.  He does not abide by the laws and customs of our society.  He ignores social amenities and has been arrested many times.  His psychopathic and sociopathic personality manifests itself in many other ways.  He does not exhibit self-control and will blubber, wail and bang his head on the floor when things are not going his way.

He exhibits strong hostility toward figures of authority, such as policemen and scientists.  He is an alcoholic and in psychic experiments he has been encouraged toward the excessive use of alcohol.  He has demonstrated the symptoms of a manic-depressive with manic episodes.  In one hypermaniacal period he acted like a violent madman and could not be restrained.

He often becomes profane and raging, completely reckless.  While depressed he ignores other people, has a far-away look and is disenchanted with everything.  He is always bored with talk unless it is about him. He often imagines himself a hero, and sometimes identifies with a violent known personality.  He also exhibits sadistic behavior, for example by embarrassing Dr. Eisenbud once, giving as his own Dr. Eisenbud's name and his profession (a psychiatrist) when arrested.

In spite of the questionable research methods and the personality quirks of Serios, a number of Denver professional men believed Ted Serios was a psychic, with a unique power to record his thoughts with a Polaroid camera.

So I can see that it wouldn't have been any fun to try and force Serios to conform to adequate scientific control protocols.  Not that this excuses Eisenbud, though; he made the claim, so saying "Serios is impossible to control" doesn't obviate his duty to observe proper experimental procedure prior to publishing any results.

Holzer, though?  He ignored the overwhelming evidence that Serios was a fraud, claiming instead that there was "abundant amount of evidence, produced in the glaring limelight of public attention and under strictest scientific test conditions."  Which is not so much a dodge as it is a flat-out falsehood.  And that, to me, is inexcusable.

And another thing -- Holzer mischaracterizes skeptics and scientists in another way, one that shows that he didn't understand the scientific process at all.  He describes scientists as clinging to their preconceived notions, even in the face of evidence, as if the entire scientific edifice was threatened by new data, and the researchers themselves determined to sit back and keeping the same understanding of the universe they'd had all along.  The truth is, science depends on finding new and puzzling information; that's how science progresses.  Now, scientists are humans, and you can find many examples of people clutching their favorite model with both hands even when the contradictory evidence comes rolling in.  (A good example is how long it took the plate tectonics/continental drift model to be accepted.)  But then it's beholden upon the scientist making the extraordinary claim to produce such incontrovertible evidence that the opposition has no choice but to acquiesce -- which is exactly what happened when Drummond Matthews and Frederick Vine proved seafloor spreading and plate movement beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The truth is that finding new evidence that modifies or overturns a previous model is how careers are made in science.  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Journalists are always writing articles with headlines that say, 'Scientists have to go back to the drawing board.'  As if we scientists are sitting in our offices, our feet up on the desk, masters of the universe, then suddenly... oops!  Somebody discovered something!  No, we're always back at the drawing board.  If you're not at the drawing board, you're not making discoveries.  You're not doing science."

In my own case, I'm certainly a skeptic, even if I'm not a scientist but only a humble layperson.  And I can say without any hesitation that I would love it if there was hard evidence for the paranormal, and of life after death in particular.  Can you imagine how that would change our understanding of the world, and of ourselves?  Plus the added benefit of knowing that death wasn't the end of us.  Me, I'm not particularly fond of the idea of nonexistence; an afterlife would be awesome, especially if it involved a tropical climate, hammocks, and drinks with little umbrellas.

But be that as it may.  I still find Holzer's book entertaining, at least the parts with the actual ghost stories.  The diatribes about the evil skeptics and narrow-minded scientists, not so much.  It'd be nice to see more of the collaborative efforts to investigate paranormal claims, such as the ones done by the Society of Psychical Research.

But just saying "science is ignoring the evidence," and then presenting evidence that is clearly spurious, is not helping the parapsychologists' claims at all.

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The invention of Philip

Despite my being immersed for years in the Wild World of Woo-Woo, I still occasionally run across things that I'd never heard of.  Some of them are apparently famous enough that I think, after finding out about them, "How on earth did I miss that one?"

Take, for example, the "Philip Experiment," which I bumped into for the first time yesterday morning.  The "experiment" -- although I myself would have hesitated to use that term to describe it -- was the brainchild of Iris Owen, leader of the "Owen Group," which was a team of parapsychology investigators in Toronto in the 1970s.  Owen and her pals apparently were tired of contacting the spirits of actual dead people, so they came up with an interesting idea; would it be possible to invent a fake dead person, and have that dead person's soul become real?

I was already laughing by this point, but it gets even funnier.  Owen & Co. dreamed up "Philip Aylesford," a fictional seventeenth-century Englishman.  Philip, according to the site Mystica, "...was born in England in 1624 and followed an early military career.  At the age of sixteen he was knighted.  He had an illustrious role in the Civil War.  He became a personal friend of Prince Charles (later Charles II) and worked for him as a secret agent.  But Philip brought about his own undoing by having an affair with a Gypsy girl.  When his wife found out she accused the girl of witchcraft, and the girl was burned at the stake.   In despair Philip committed suicide in 1654 at the age of thirty."

One of the more artistically-minded Owen Group members even drew Philip's portrait:

So the Owen Group began to meditate on Philip's life, meeting frequently to have deep discussions about All Things Philip.  After fleshing out the details of Philip's history, they finally decided to have a séance to see if they could raise Philip's soul from the afterlife.

Have I been emphatic enough on the point that Philip Aylesford wasn't a real guy?

I doubt anyone will be surprised, however, that the séance and "table tipping" sessions that followed showed some serious results.  Philip did the "rap once for yes, twice for no" thing, giving correct answers to questions about his life.  Questions that, of course, everyone in the room knew the answer to.  The table in the room where the séance was held moved in a mystifying manner; Philip, one source recounts, would "move the table, sliding it from side to side despite the fact that the floor was covered with thick carpeting.  At times it would even 'dance' on one leg." Mystica tells us that Philip "...had a special rapport with Iris Owen," and even whispered some answers to her, although efforts to catch the whispers on an audio recording were "inconclusive."

We are told, by way of an "explanation" (although again I am reluctant to use that word here), that Philip was an egrigor -- "a supernatural intelligence produced by the will or visualization of participants in a group."  I, predictably, would offer the alternative definition of, "a delightful mélange of collective delusion, hoax, wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect."

Of course, this hasn't stopped the whole thing from being spread about as solid evidence of the paranormal.  It was the subject of a YouTube video, which I encourage you all to watch for the humor value alone.  Even funnier, the "Philip Experiment" encouraged other parapsychology buffs to try to replicate the results.  The Paranormal Phenomena site (linked above) tells us that other groups have been successful at making contact with Lilith, a French Canadian spy; Sebastian, a medieval alchemist; Axel, a man from the future; and Skippy Cartman, a 14-year-old Australian girl.

I bet you think I'm going to say "I made the last one up."  Sorry, but no.  The "Skippy Experiment" is a real thing, and "Skippy Cartman" was able to communicate via "raps and scratching sounds."

It's probably too much to hope for that she asked for "some goddamn Cheesy Poofs."

I know I've written about some ridiculous things before, but this one has got to be in the Top Ten.  All through doing the research for this post, I kept having to stop to do two things: (1) checking to see if this was some kind of parody, and (2) getting paper towels to wipe up the coffee that I'd choke-snorted all over my computer monitor.  I mean, really, people.  If the paranormalists actually want us skeptical science-minded types to take them seriously -- to consider what they do to be valid experimentation -- they need to stop pulling this kind of crapola.  I know that skeptics can sometimes be guilty of doing the throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bath thing, better known as the Package Deal Fallacy -- "some of this is nonsense, so it's all nonsense."  But still.  The fact that a lot of the paranormal sites that feature the Philip Experiment were completely uncritical in their support of its validity makes me rather doubt that they can tell a good experiment from a bad one in general.

That said, I have to say that if we really can communicate with fictional entities, there are a few characters from some of my novels that I wouldn't mind having a chat with.  Tyler Vaughan, the main character from Signal to Noise, would be a good place to start, although I have it on good authority that Tyler is so much like me that I probably wouldn't gain much by talking to him.  It'd be kind of cool to meet Duncan Kyle from Sephirot to ask him about his travels, and the brilliant, eccentric telepath Callista Lee from The Snowe Agency Mysteries because she could probably tell me anything I wanted to know about human nature.

But it's not possible, of course.  And if all I got were some "raps and scratching noises" for my effort, it'd probably not be worth the effort in any case.

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Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

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

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!]

Contention in the ganzfeld

I just ran into an article over at Psychology Today that I thought deserved a close examination.

It's by Steve Taylor, senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, and is called "Open-Minded Science."  A one-line summary of the article is that science has an inherent bias against considering parapsychological phenomenon, and that there is compelling evidence of telepathy (known as "psi" by aficionados) from what is known as the ganzfeld experiment.

So, a little background.  Ganzfeld is a German word meaning "entire field," and purports to set test subjects up to maximize their ability to collect data from another mind telepathically.  First proposed by German psychology researcher Wolfgang Metzger, what the procedure entails is placing the subject in complete (or as complete as can be managed) sensory deprivation.  A series of patterns or letters, either on cards or on a computer screen, is observed by the researcher, and the subject attempts to identify what the researcher is seeing.  The removal of other sensory inputs, supporters claim, makes subjects better able to sense telepathic signals, and results in a far higher than chance ability to select the correct target patterns.

The gist of Taylor's article is that these positive results -- well beyond what would be considered statistically significant support for psi -- are being ignored by the scientific establishment because of an entrenched bias against anything that's "paranormal."  Taylor writes:

In recent years, a series of studies showing significant results from psi phenomena have been published in a whole range of major psychology journals.  A number of comprehensive overviews of the evidence have also been published.  Most notably, last year American Psychologist carried an article by Professor Etzel Cardeña entitled “The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A Review.”  Cardeña showed clearly that the evidence for phenomena like telepathy, precognition and clairvoyance has proven so significant and consistent over a massive range of difference experiments that it cannot simply be explained away in terms of fraud, the “file drawer” effect (when researchers don’t bother to publish negative results) or poor methodology.  Cardeña also showed that there is no reason at all to take the view that these phenomena break the laws of science, science they are compatible with many of the theories and findings of quantum physics (which is why many quantum physicists have been open to their existence.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, it drives me nuts when people start attributing psychic phenomena to quantum physics, because those associations are usually based upon scant knowledge of what quantum physics actually says.  But let's look past that for now.  Taylor goes on to say that the evidence has been mounting for years:

A meta-analysis of more than three thousand Ganzfeld trials that took place from 1974 to 2004 had a combined ‘hit rate’ of 32 per cent.  A seven percent higher than chance rate may not seem so impressive, but over such a large number of experiments, this equates to odds of thousands of trillions to one—and a figure far too significant to explained in terms of the file drawer effect.  In addition, in Ganzfeld experiments that have been undertaken with creative people, there has been a significantly higher than normal rate of success.  In 128 Ganzfeld sessions with artistically gifted students at the University of Edinburgh, a 47% success rate was obtained, with odds of 140 million to one.  Similarly, in a session with undergraduates from the Juilliard school of performing arts, the students achieved a hit rate of 50%.

If these figures are correct, then Taylor's right; this is evidence that demands an honest analysis.  As skeptics, we can't just pay attention to the evidence that lines up with the way we already decided the world works, and ignore everything else.  So let's take a look at his claim.

In 1999, Richard Wiseman and Julie Milton, of the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Edinburgh respectively, published a meta-analysis of ganzfeld results in the Psychological Bulletin.  Wiseman and Milton were unequivocal:

The new ganzfeld studies show a near-zero effect size and a statistically nonsignificant overall cumulation.  Out of three autoganzfeld internal effects that the new database examined, only one effect was replicated, and it turns out to have been mistakenly reported by Bern and Honorton (1994) as having been statistically significant in the autoganzfeld studies...  Whatever the reason, the autoganzfeld results have not been replicated by a "broader range of researchers."  The ganzfeld paradigm cannot at present be seen as constituting strong evidence for psychic functioning.

The pro-psi researchers then launched their own rebuttal.  A paper by Daryl Bem, John Palmer, and Richard S. Broughton in the Journal of Parapsychology, published in September of 2001, didn't argue with Wiseman and Milton's analysis, but said that there were ten new studies, and when those are added to the ones analyzed by Wiseman and Milton, "the overall ganzfeld effect again becomes significant."  Thus they stood firm on claims Daryl Bem and Chuck Honorton had made seven years earlier, when they had published their own meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin in which they stated outright that "the psi ganzfeld effect is large enough to be of both theoretical interest and potential practical importance."

Here's where we get into murky water.  Psychological researcher Susan Blackmore, who has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the clearest, most open-minded thinkers on the subject -- and who herself is not willing to dismiss psi out of hand -- clobbered Bem and Honorton in a 2017 article in Skeptical Inquirer, stating that they had included in their analysis a series of studies by Carl Sargent that had been widely criticized for methodological flaws, and in which "the better the quality of the study, the smaller the apparent psi effect."  More troubling still is that Bem and Honorton, apparently deliberately, never mentioned Sargent's name as the source of some of their data, knowing that -- quite rightly -- this would cast doubt over their whole analysis.  Blackmore writes:

They also admitted that “One laboratory contributed 9 of the studies.  Honorton’s own laboratory contributed 5…  Thus, half of the studies were conducted by only 2 laboratories.” (Bem & Honorton, 1994, p 6).  But they did not say which laboratory contributed those nine studies.  Even worse they did not mention Sargent, giving no references to his papers and none to mine.  No one reading their review would have a clue that serious doubt had been cast on more than a quarter of the studies involved. 

I have since met Bem more than once, most recently at one of the Tucson consciousness conferences where we were able to have a leisurely breakfast together and discuss the evidence for the paranormal.  I told Bem how shocked I was that he had included the Sargent data without saying where it came from and without referencing either Sargent’s own papers or the debate that followed my discoveries.  He simply said it did not matter.

But one study -- and one researcher's apparent shoulder-shrug at including debunked studies in his analysis -- doesn't mean much.  There was an in-depth analysis done in 2013 by Jeffrey Rouder, Richard Morey, and Jordan Province, published in Psychological Bulletin, that had the following to say:

Psi phenomena, such as mental telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance, have garnered much recent attention.  We reassess the evidence for psi effects from Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio's (2010) meta-analysis...  We find that the evidence from Storm et al.'s presented data set favors the existence of psi by a factor of about 6 billion to 1, which is noteworthy even for a skeptical reader.  Much of this effect, however, may reflect difficulties in randomization: Studies with computerized randomization have smaller psi effects than those with manual randomization.  When the manually randomized studies are excluded and omitted studies included, the Bayes factor evidence is at most 330 to 1, a greatly attenuated value.  We argue that this value is unpersuasive in the context of psi because there is no plausible mechanism and because there are almost certainly omitted replication failures.

And because there can never be enough meta-analyses, researcher and skeptic Andrew Endersby did his own in 2005, and had the following to say:

At the end of my research I find a hit rate of between 28.6% and 28.9% depending on certain choices concerning which scoring methods to use on particular experiments.  This doesn't have quite the headline grabbing appeal of 1 in 3 instead of 1 in 4 but the hit rate is still highly significant for 6,700 sessions.  However, this contains all experiments.  Flawed or not, standard or not.  There's no doubt that this figure can be tweaked up or down according to ruling in or out certain experiments.

Not exactly a ringing proclamation of support.

So where are we now?  Same place, pretty  much.  You've got your true believers, your fervent disbelievers, and people in the middle like myself who would very much like to know if there's actually something there to study.  Because if the ganzfeld effect actually works, it would be kind of earthshattering, you know?  It would mean that there actually was a mechanism for information transfer between minds, and would overturn the basic assumption we have about neuroscience -- that what occurs in your mind is solely the result of electrical and chemical signaling within your own skull.  Even The Skeptic's Dictionary -- usually squarely on the side of the scoffers -- is unwilling to discount it out of hand.  Here's how the entry for the ganzfeld effect ends:

Actually, what we know is that the jury is still out and it probably will never come in if the best that parapsychologists can come up with is a statistic in a meta-analysis that is unlikely due to chance.  Even if we take the data at face value, we know that no matter how statistically significant the results are, the actual size of this psi effect is so small that we can’t detect it in a single person in any obvious way.  We have to deduce it from guessing experiments.  What hope do we have of isolating, harnessing, or expanding this power if a person who has it can’t even directly recognize its presence?

I'll end with another quote from Susan Blackmore, which I think is spot-on.  If anyone has replicable, well-controlled experiments showing the existence of psi, I'm more than willing to consider them.  But until then:

Perhaps errors from the past do not matter if there really is a repeatable experiment.  The problem is that my personal experience conflicts with the successes I read about in the literature and I cannot ignore either side.  I cannot ignore other people's work because science is a collective enterprise and publication is the main way of sharing our findings.  On the other hand I cannot ignore my own findings—there would be no point in doing science, or investigating other people's work, if I did.  The only honest reaction to the claims of psi in the ganzfeld is for me to say "I don't know but I doubt it. "

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The invention of Philip

Despite my being immersed for years in the Wild World of Woo-Woo, I still occasionally run across things that I'd never heard of.  Some of them are apparently famous enough that I think, after finding out about them, "How on earth did I miss that one?"

Take, for example, the "Philip Experiment," which I bumped into for the first time yesterday morning.  The "experiment" -- although I myself would have hesitated to use that term to describe it -- was the brainchild of Iris Owen, leader of the "Owen Group," which was a team of parapsychology investigators in Toronto in the 1970s.  Owen and her pals apparently were tired of contacting the spirits of actual dead people, so they came up with an interesting idea; would it be possible to invent a fake dead person, and have that dead person's soul become real?

I was already laughing by this point, but it gets even funnier.  Owen & Co. dreamed up "Philip Aylesford," a fictional 17th century Englishman.  Philip, according to the site Mystica, "...was born in England in 1624 and followed an early military career.  At the age of sixteen he was knighted. He had an illustrious role in the Civil War.  He became a personal friend of Prince Charles (later Charles II) and worked for him as a secret agent.  But Philip brought about his own undoing by having an affair with a Gypsy girl.  When his wife found out she accused the girl of witchcraft, and the girl was burned at the stake.  In despair Philip committed suicide in 1654 at the age of thirty."

One of the more artistically-minded Owen Group members even drew Philip's portrait:

So the Owen Group began to meditate on Philip's life, meeting frequently to have deep discussions about All Things Philip.  After fleshing out the details of Philip's history, they finally decided to have a séance to see if they could raise Philip's soul from the afterlife.

Have I been emphatic enough on the point that Philip Aylesford wasn't a real guy?

I doubt anyone will be surprised, however, that the séance and "table tipping" sessions that followed showed some serious results.  Philip did the "rap once for yes, twice for no" thing, giving correct answers to questions about his life.  Questions that, of course, everyone in the room knew the answer to.  The table in the room where the séance was held moved in a mystifying manner; Philip, one source recounts, would "move the table, sliding it from side to side despite the fact that the floor was covered with thick carpeting.  At times it would even 'dance' on one leg."  Mystica tells us that Philip "...had a special rapport with Iris Owen," and even whispered some answers to her, although efforts to catch the whispers on an audio recording were "inconclusive."

We are told, by way of an "explanation" (although again I am reluctant to use that word here), that Philip was an egrigor -- "a supernatural intelligence produced by the will or visualization of participants in a group."  Whatever that means.  I, predictably, would offer the alternative definition of, "a delightful mélange of collective delusion, hoax, wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect."

Of course, this hasn't stopped the whole thing from being spread about as solid evidence of the paranormal.  It was the subject of a YouTube video, which I encourage you all to watch for the humor value alone.  Even funnier, the "Philip Experiment" encouraged other parapsychology buffs to try to replicate the results.  The Paranormal Phenomena site (linked above) tells us that other groups have been successful at making contact with Lilith, a French Canadian spy; Sebastian, a medieval alchemist; Axel, a man from the future; and Skippy Cartman, a 14-year-old Australian girl.

I bet you think I'm going to say "I made the last one up."  Sorry, but no.  The "Skippy Experiment" is a real thing, and "Skippy Cartman" was able to communicate via "raps and scratching sounds."

It's probably too much to hope for that she asked for "some goddamn Cheesy Poofs."

I know I've written about some ridiculous things before, but this one has got to be in the Top Ten.  All through doing the research for this post, I kept having to stop to do two things: (1) checking to see if this was some kind of parody, and (2) getting paper towels to wipe up the coffee that I'd choke-snorted all over my computer monitor.  I mean, really, people.  If the paranormalists actually want us skeptical science-minded types to take them seriously -- to consider what they do to be valid experimentation -- they need to stop pulling this kind of crapola.  I know that skeptics can sometimes be guilty of doing the throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bath thing, better known as the Package Deal Fallacy -- "some of this is nonsense, so it's all nonsense."  But still.  The fact that a lot of the paranormal sites that feature the Philip Experiment were completely uncritical in their support of its validity makes me rather doubt that they can tell a good experiment from a bad one in general.

That said, I have to say that if we really can communicate with fictional entities, there are a few characters from some of my novels that I wouldn't mind having a chat with.  Tyler Vaughan, the main character from Signal to Noise, would be a good place to start, although I have it on good authority that Tyler is so much like me that I probably wouldn't gain much by talking to him.  It'd be kind of cool to meet Nick Calladine from We All Fall Down to tell him he made the right decision, and Bethany Hale from The Parsifal Snowe Mysteries because she's badass and tough and smokin' hot.

But it's not possible, of course.  And if all I got were some "raps and scratching noises" for my effort, it'd probably not be worth the effort in any case.

Woo-woo accreditation

Some of the things I run into, while doing research for this blog, are simply baffling.

Okay, a lot of them are baffling.  But at least for the majority of them, you can sort of understand why people would believe them, or at least want to.  There's an inherent attractiveness to the concept of an afterlife, a grandeur implicit in the idea of extraterrestrial life, and an inarguable coolness to cryptids like Bigfoot and El Chupacabra.  So even if I don't exactly understand why someone would believe in all that stuff, given the absence of any kind of scientifically admissible evidence, at least I get why someone would want to believe it.

I ran into something yesterday, however, that I find puzzling on a very deep level.  It started when I clicked on an advertisement called "Parapsychology - Online Training Courses."  I guess that on some level, I knew that these sorts of things existed -- there certainly are thousands of books out there that give would-be psychics information (to stretch the definition of the word some) about how it all works, and how to access your inner woo-woo.  But training courses?

Let's consider how that could work by comparing it to training in another field -- medicine.

If you have aspirations to become a doctor, nurse, nurse practitioner, or other medical professional, you enter an accredited training program, and undergo a rigorous set of classes in which you learn how the human body works, how to recognize when systems aren't working properly, and what can be done to return the body to normal functioning.  After several years of courses and labs, you begin to work with real people in a supervised setting -- learning first how to perform simple, and later more complex, treatment modalities.  In the process, experienced medical staff watch you, help you, and correct you when your technique isn't up to par.  Eventually, you gain certification to work, at whatever level of care you were trained for, and are trusted thereafter to give good care to your patients.

How, then, could a parapsychological training course work?

The website states that "Curriculum concepts cover crystals, auras, spirits, ghosts, dreams, psychic abilities... numerology, astral travel, and tarot."  The first part of my analogy to medical training isn't problematic, at least on the surface -- certainly an "experienced psychic" (whatever that means in practice) could teach me all sorts of things about how to use crystal energies or how to project my astral body into another plane of reality.  But however would anyone know if you were doing it correctly?  Being that the sorts of things these courses purport to teach have no valid scientific basis, there's no touchstone of evidence by which anyone could be evaluated.

Parapsychology Course Teacher:  "Take a look at the woman seated in the chair in front of you.  What color is her aura?"

Student:  "Well, it looks to me sort of tangerine-colored, with little streaks of puce and magenta around the edges."

Teacher:  "Wrong!  It's chartreuse!  You are assigned to do twelve more aura-viewings, until you get it right."

Now, you might think that being an online course, students are freer to just play along, to make stuff up (same as their teachers are apparently doing), and as long as they say the right made-up stuff, they get a passing grade and a nice certificate and can go on to hang out their shingles and begin to collect $20 per Tarot card reading.  But another site I found (here) states that some of these programs offer associates, bachelors, masters, and even doctoral degrees... and that the programs listed on the site have all achieved accreditation through the Council for Higher Education Accreditation or the US Department of Education.

And I'm thinking: how can that possibly work?  It would be easy, for example, to tell a bad medical school from a good one; a bad one (for example) might teach that the best method to treat an ulcer is to bleed you using leeches, and a good one would not.  But how on earth could you tell a good parapsychology school from a bad one, given that (to put not too fine a point on it), both of them are engaging you in a course of study of something that doesn't, technically, exist?  On what basis would accreditation be awarded?

So the whole thing has left me more baffled than usual.   I must admit that the schools involved have quite a lucrative racket going; taking students' tuition money and putting them through a training program where the teachers essentially spend four years or longer making stuff up, and give students passing grades when they can make stuff up as well as the teachers can, seems like a pretty clever way to make money.  But it does appall me that the CHEA and USDOE are, on some level, putting their stamp of approval on this stuff.  It wouldn't be the first time that I've been horrified at something that those who oversee education have done, but this seems pretty extreme, even for them.