Mind over matter

The difficulty with a lot of claims of psychic phenomena (besides the unfortunate lack of hard evidence) is that they kind of fall apart when you say, "show me the mechanism."  Even the practitioners can't tell you how the whole thing is alleged to work.  It's very seldom you get anyone willing to go out on a limb and tell you, specifically, how paranormal experiences happen; most of them say something like "some folks can do it, others can't, it's mysterious," and leave it at that.

So the link sent to me last week by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia is a bit of an anomaly.  In it, we are given  a set of step-by-step instructions for learning...

... telekinesis.

Yes, telekinesis, the skill made famous in the historical documentary Carrie wherein a high school girl got revenge on the classmates who had bullied her by basically flinging heavy objects at them with her mind and then locking them inside a burning gymnasium.  Hating bullies as I do, I certainly understand her doing this, although it's probably a good thing this ability isn't widespread.  Given how fractious the current political situation is, if everyone suddenly learned how to move things with their minds, the United States as viewed from space would probably look like a huge, whirling, debris-strewn hurricane of objects being thrown about every time something about the former president appears in the news.

But if you'd like to be able to do this, you can learn how at the aptly-named site HowToTelekinesis.com.  But to save your having to paw through the site, I'll hit the highlights here.  You can try 'em out and afterwards report back if you had any success in, say, levitating your cat.

Polish spiritualist medium Stanisława Tomczyk levitating a pair of scissors that totally was not connected to a piece of thread tied to her fingers  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Step one, apparently, is that you have to believe that there is no external reality, because otherwise "your logical mind will be fighting your telekinesis endeavors every step of the way."  I know this would be a problem for me.  The author of the website suggests that you can accomplish this by studying some quantum physics, because quantum physics tells us the following:

Everything we see, hear, feel, taste and smell is light and energy vibrating at a fixed frequency.  This energy is being projected from within, both individually and collectively.  Our energy projection is reflected back and interpreted and perceived as “real” via the mind through our five senses. That is the condensed version of reality.

The problem is, quantum physics doesn't say any such thing, as anyone who has taken a college physics class knows.  Quantum physics describes the behavior of small, discrete packets of energy ("quanta") which ordinarily only have discernible effects in the realm of the submicroscopic.  It is also, in essence, a mathematical model, and as such has nothing whatsoever to do with an "energy projection (being) reflected back and interpreted and perceived as real by the mind."

But apparently if you're inclined to learn telekinesis, you can interpret the findings of physics any way that's convenient for you.

Oh, and we're told that it also helps to watch the woo-woo documentary extraordinaire What the Bleep Do We Know?, which was produced by J. Z. Knight, the Washington-based loon who claims to channel a 35,000 year old guy from Atlantis named "Ramtha."  The author waxes rhapsodic about how scientifically accurate this film is, despite the fact that damn near everything in the film is inaccurate at best and an outright lie at worst.

Step two is understanding your "telekinesis toolkit," which includes "empathy, mindset, and energy."  They explain it this way:

Imagine feelings being the words spoken on your phone, and empathy is the signal or wire connecting you.  Your mindset is the phone itself and energy is the electricity used to run it.  You have to have a phone, signal and power to communicate.  A lame phone, weak signal or low battery will make doing telekinesis nearly impossible.

I daresay it will.

Step three is finding a good mentor.  Since these mentors aren't free, let's just say that I had a sudden "Aha" moment when I got to this point.  The website tells us that the best mentors are at the Avatar Energy Mastery Institute, where we can learn the following:

You will learn all about energy, chakras, clairvoyance, out of body travel, mind and soul expansion, healing, higher-self, time travel, lucid dreaming and pretty much everything else a seeker could hope for.  I also know that Ormus from www.SacredSupplements.com really enhances psychic abilities and speeds the learning process.

When I saw "Ormus," something in the back of my brain went off.  I knew I'd seen this before.  At first I thought it was the name of the evil blob of black goo that killed Tasha Yar in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation and wondered why anyone would take supplements made from that guy, but turns out his name was Armus, not Ormus.

But it still sounded somehow familiar, so I did a little research, and sure enough, a while back I did a post on Ormus, which is an acronym standing for "Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements."  And yes, I know that spells "ORME" and not "ORMUS," but since we're kind of disconnected from reality here anyhow, we'll let that slide.  Evidently the believers in Ormus think that taking this stuff can do everything up to and including (I am not making this up) changing your inertial mass, and I don't mean that you got heavier because you just swallowed something.  They claim that taking Ormus makes your inertial mass smaller, which would be surprising for any supplement not made of antimatter.

And taking antimatter supplements has its own fairly alarming set of health risks, the worst of which is exploding in a burst of gamma rays.

So anyway.  The step-by-step instructions turned out to be kind of a bust, frankly.  I'm thinking that if you do all of this stuff, telekinesis is still going to be pretty much out of the question, which is a shame, because it could be kind of fun, as well as making moving heavy furniture a lot easier.  But feel free to give it all a try.  Let me know, though, if you're planning on lobbing any heavy furniture my way.  The hate mail I get on a daily basis is bad enough.

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Re-examining the ganzfeld

Today's post asks a question not because I'm trying to lead you toward a particular answer, but because I honestly don't know the answer myself.

In Wednesday's post, I discussed some alleged claims by psychics (which a team in Australia evaluated for accuracy and found seriously wanting) and made the statement, "I'm all for keeping an open mind about things, but at some point you have to conclude that a complete absence of hard evidence means there's nothing there to see."

A friend of mine responded, "What if there's hard evidence out there that you're choosing not to accept because you've already made your mind up?"  He wasn't being combative; like me, he was just asking a question, and it's actually a reasonable thing to ask.  And he sent me a link to a post over at Paranormal Daily News that looks at one of the most famous experimental setups for detecting psychic powers: the ganzfeld experiment.

"Ganzfeld" is German for "complete field," and refers to the fact that the test subjects are placed in near-complete sensory deprivation, in order to keep them from receiving any information accept (allegedly) from telepathy.  Padded goggles are placed over the eyes; earpieces play recordings of white noise.  The subjects lie flat in a place with no drafts or other air movement.  (Some have even had subjects floating in a sensory deprivation tank.)  Then the "sender" -- usually the researcher conducting the experiment -- looks at some kind of pattern, often the famous "Zener cards" (cards with five different geometric patterns in five different colors), and the "receiver" (the test subject) reports what (s)he sees/experiences.

A participant in a ganzfeld experiment [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Wikipedia page for the ganzfeld experiment (linked above) is unequivocal; it says, "[It] is a pseudoscientific technique to detect parapsychological phenomena...  Consistent, independent replication of ganzfeld experiments has not been achieved."  However, the article my friend sent is equally unequivocal in the opposite direction -- that it has generated results that are far outside of what would come out of a random-choice statistical model, and has been done over and over with the same outcome.  The author, Craig Weiler, writes:

This works.  Not perfectly, but certainly well enough for an experiment.  It’s been done more than enough times by more than enough people to rule out any statistical anomalies.  The success rate is typically between 32 and 35%.  That’s pretty normal for a successful, statistics based experiment.  There have been six different meta analyses from skeptics and researchers alike, all showing positive results.  From an objective scientific perspective, this is an ordinary successful scientific experiment.

While I can't say I warm to the sneery tone of the article -- Weiler really needs to learn the difference between a "skeptic" and a "scoffer" -- it does bring up the question of who's right, here.  The critics of the ganzfeld experiment and other such attempts to prove the existence of paranormal abilities claim that no sufficiently-controlled experiment has ever generated positive results; the supporters claim that there are plenty of positive results that all the scientists are ignoring because they can't explain them (or, worse, because those results contradict their own biases).

Weiler is right that there have been meta-analyses done of the ganzfeld results, and that they have changed the minds of neither the pro- nor the anti- factions.  Finding a truly unbiased analysis has turned out to be not to be easy.  A September 2020 article in Frontiers in Psychology by Thomas Rayberon comes the closest of anything I've seen, but unfortunately tries to steer a middle course of "maybe, maybe not" by agreeing with both sides at once even though they're saying opposite things.  Rayberon writes (citations have been removed in the interest of space; go to the original article if you're interested in seeing them):

Psi research can be considered as a subfield of consciousness studies concerned with interactions between individuals and their environment that transcends the ordinary constraints of space-time.  Different lines of research have been developed for more than a century to tackle psi using experimental research, spontaneous cases, clinical cases, selected participants, and applications.  Several meta-analyses of studies conducted under controlled conditions examine precognitive dreams, telepathy, and presentiment and have demonstrated statistically significant effects...

While these results support the existence of consistent anomalous experience/behavior that has been labeled “psi,” there is currently no consensus in the scientific community concerning their interpretation and two main positions have emerged so far.  The “skeptics” suppose that they are the consequences of errors, bias, and different forms of QRPs [questionable research practices].  The “proponents” argue that these results prove the existence of psi beyond reasonable doubt and that new research should move on to the analysis of psi processes rather than yet more attempts to prove its existence.  This absence of consensus is related to the difficulty of drawing firm conclusions from the results of psi research.  Indeed, they represent an anomaly because there is currently no scientific model – based on physical or biology principles – to explain such interactions even if they exist.

Which reminds me from the quote from Lord of the Rings, "Go not to the Elves for advice, for they will say both yes and no."  The last bit -- that there is no current scientific model that could account for psychic phenomena -- is certainly true; but if there are statistically significant effects (which Rayberon says explicitly in the preceding paragraph), then surely there must be some protocol for devising an experiment that meets the minimum criteria of the true skeptics (people who base their understanding on the evidence, regardless of what their preconceived notions might have said).  The fact that there is no current scientific model to explain telepathy is, while correct, entirely irrelevant.  The first thing to do is to determine if the phenomenon itself is real.  There was no scientific model to explain radioactivity when it was discovered by Henri Becquerel, nor the apparent constancy of the speed of light when it was demonstrated by Michelson and Morley, nor the patterns of inheritance uncovered by Gregor Mendel.  The first thing was to determine if what they were seeing was accurate.  Once that happened, the scientists moved on to trying to figure out a model that accounted for it.

Rayberon then goes on to make quite a puzzling statement that implies it might be impossible even to tell if the phenomenon is real.  Science, he says (again, correct most of the time) uses experimental protocols that eliminate any possibility of interference by the experimenter.  That's impossible in psi research (italics are the author's):

Thus, if psi exists, the problem is the following: an advertent or inadvertent “direct” interaction between the researcher and the object of study could be possible.  This destroys the conditions necessary for the convincing scientific demonstration of psi itself.

Rayberon says this "paradox" makes psi research impossible to confirm or disconfirm.  But isn't an interaction between the researcher and the test subject what the psi researchers themselves are trying to demonstrate?  What an honest psi researcher -- well, any honest researcher, really -- needs to do is to isolate the variable (s)he's studying so that, as far as is possible, whatever results come out of the experiment can only be attributable to that variable.  So in a properly-conducted ganzfeld experiment, the researcher has eliminated any possibility of the test subject getting information about the pattern from anywhere except the mind of the "sender."

And from my admittedly layperson's viewpoint, that can't be all that hard to do.  If there have been multiple instances of positive, statistically-significant results from ganzfeld trials -- and Weiler and Rayberon agree that there have been -- then they deserve some explanation other than shrugging and saying, "I don't see how it could work."  If there are "errors, biases, and questionable research practices" generating the results, the "skeptics" (using the word in the sense both Weiler and Rayberon use) need to determine what those are.  If, on the other hand, the results aren't from poor experimental design or outright cheating, then let's have the "skeptics" and "proponents" team up to find a protocol they can both agree to.

Figuring out a model for what's going on can wait until we see if there is anything going on.

So after accusing Rayberon of playing both sides, I'm honestly not doing much better.  My inclination is to doubt the existence of psi abilities because the evidence seems sketchy for such a wild claim.  But that inclination is a bias I'm well aware of, and all it would take is one sufficiently well-designed experiment to convince me I was wrong.  Right now, all that seems to be happening is both sides becoming more entrenched and yelling at each other across no-man's land, which doesn't accomplish much but pissing everyone off.

So come on, folks.  Either psi exists or it doesn't.  If it doesn't, we can go on to studying actual real phenomena.  If it does, it will overturn pretty much everything we know about psychology, and would be one of the most colossal discoveries in the past hundred years.  How about teaming up and settling this question once and for all?

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Nice rice

It's important to keep your brain connected when you read articles in popular media that start with the line, "Scientists Have Just Discovered That..."

Between the lure of advertiser revenue from clickbait and the simple fact that a lot of laypeople can't tell peer-reviewed science from loony claims, it's easy to get fooled.  I saw a pretty egregious example of that a couple of days ago, in an article that claimed that scientists have shown that "intentionality" changes the spoil rate of cooked rice.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

No, I'm not making this up.  I found the original research -- if I can dignify it by that name -- in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which a little bit of digging suggests a specialty in fringe-y, and sometimes cringe-y, claims.  The paper is entitled "Human Mental Intentionality on the Aesthetics of Cooked Rice and Escherichia coli Growth," by Alan W. L. Lai, Bonny B. H. Yuen, and Richard Burchett, of Beijing Normal University, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the United International College of Guangdong Province (China), respectively.

The gist of the experiment was that they had a group of people think happy thoughts at a bowl of cooked rice, a second thought think negative thoughts, and a third group think neutral thoughts, then had people evaluate the bowls of rice for their "aesthetics," and also measured the amount of E. coli growth in each bowl.  Now for myself, the amount of E. coli I want in my bowl of rice is zero, but apparently that's not a likely outcome.  The authors write:

This study examines the “intentionality hypothesis”—i.e. subjects’ ability to mentally infl uence microbial growth in samples of cooked rice.  Over a 30-day period (under triple-blind conditions), subjects focused their positive and negative thoughts (‘mental intentionality’) toward three randomly formed groups of cooked rice samples (positive intentionality, negative intentionality, and a control group).  After 30 days, pictures were taken of the nine rice samples (three groups, each group was conducted in triplicate), which were then judged for visual aesthetic value.  Findings show aesthetic ratings of ‘positive’ rice samples to be significantly higher than those for ‘negative’ and ‘control’ ones (p ≤ 0.05), with no significant difference between negative and control sample ratings (p ≥ 0.05).  A further test entailed a 7-day study measuring an Escherichia coli strain (a type of coliform that is closely associated with food safety, whose presence often indicates food poisoning and spoilage) in vitro under the same conditions of stimuli as the rice samples.  Results show positive intention to be associated with lower E. coli division rate when compared with the “control” and “negative intention” groups, thereby further supporting the hypothesis, as well as suggesting an emerging inference, that intentionality might be associated with microbial growth and visual aesthetic ratings.

We're told that the negative thoughts included reprimands, which brings up the question of how you could effectively reprimand rice.  "No no!  Bad rice!" doesn't seem particularly appropriate, given that it's the sort of thing you say to dogs when they do something they're not supposed to, such as swiping an entire wedge of expensive brie from the kitchen counter, and eating the whole thing including the plastic wrapper.  (Yes, that's the voice of experience, right there.)  But with rice, I'm not sure how this would work.  What exactly did you expect the rice to be doing?  More specifically, what was it doing that deserved a reprimand?  I've observed cooked rice carefully, and mostly what it does is sit there.  Almost anything else it might do would be a significant shock, and the first thing I'd think of doing is yelling "What the fuck?" and jumping up out of my chair, not saying "Bad rice!" in a disapproving tone.

Anyhow, the results seem to me to be pretty nebulous.  The aesthetic score ranges from zero to four, and the positive-thought rice had an average score of 1.5 ± 0.3, the negative-thought rice 1.0 ± 0.2, and the control rice 0.9 ± 0.2.  So not only were the scores pretty broad-brush (0-4 seems like a kind of coarse-grained scale), they were all relatively close, especially the negative and the control groups.  The E. coli measurements are equally suspect; here the positive and negative groups were fairly close together, and the control group significantly lower than either one.  (If you want to see the graphed data, I direct you to the paper I have linked above.)

So it seems to me that if either experiment suggests anything, it's that rice doesn't like people staring at it meaningfully, regardless of what they're thinking.

Another red flag in this paper is their referencing the completely discredited "research" by Masaru Emoto, a Japanese scientist who made the claim that if you think negative thoughts at water while it's freezing, it forms ugly crystals.  No, I'm not making this up either, and despite the fact that it has never been successfully replicated, it continues to resurface every time someone claims to have discovered the Magical Quantum Frequency of Love.

Like Emoto's Happy Ice experiment, I'm not buying the Nice Rice results until they are replicated, under controlled conditions, by scientists who don't have a dog in the race.  Note that I'm not accusing Lai et al. of falsifying results, I'm just suspicious enough about their methodology -- not to mention the complete lack of a mechanism by which any of this could work -- that until someone can duplicate their results and show a statistically significant difference in a variable that is rigorously quantifiable, I'm in the dubious column.

So if you're mad at your bowl of rice, my feeling is you should not hesitate to berate it mercilessly.  It will not become bacteria-laden and unattractive thereby.  On the other hand, if you are someone who gets angry at your food, you might want to seek out a good counselor who can help you to focus your ire on more deserving targets, such as people who make specious claims, and the irresponsible media outlets that disseminates them.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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

Reversing the arrow

After a deep philosophical discussion, a friend once said to me, "You're only a skeptic because you don't have the balls to be a mystic."

I bristled (of course) and explained that my skepticism came from a desire to base my understanding on something more concrete than feelings and desires.  She shot back, "So you wouldn't have accepted the truth of atoms before the experiments that proved their existence."

"I would not have known they were real, no," I responded.

"So there could be great swaths of knowledge outside your direct experience, of which you are entirely ignorant."

"There could be, but I have no way of knowing."

She gave me a wicked grin and said, "The mystics do."

Predictably, neither of us convinced the other in the end.  I don't think any amount of mysticism would have arrived at the Bohr model of the atom and the periodic table, for example.  But the reason her arrow went in as deeply as it did is that she wasn't entirely wrong.  I have had a fascination with "other ways of knowing" -- mysticism, psychic phenomena, altered states of consciousness, and the like -- for as long as I can remember.  The lack of evidence for most of it has not dulled my interest -- if anything, it's piqued it further.

Woodcut by Camille Flammarion (1888) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I have this sort of dual life.  On the one hand, I consider myself of the hard-edged, evidence-demanding skeptical type.  On the other, I'm drawn to all sorts of woo-woo stuff that, despite my scoffing at it by day, has me researching it in the wee hours when I figure everyone's asleep and I won't get caught out.

It's also why all of my novels have a paranormal twist.  Living vicariously through my characters, I suppose.

Understandable, then, that my ears perked up immediately when I saw an article written by Dr. Julia Mossbridge in (of all places) The Daily Mail.  I've written about Mossbridge before -- she's been researching telepathy and precognition for fifteen years -- and my problem with her research, then and now, is that I don't see any possible mechanism by which either of those could work.

But.  That a scientist of her stature would continue to stand by this claim means it's worth consideration.  And I have to be careful of my own biases -- we all are prone to confirmation bias, and if my bent is to look at the world in a mechanistic fashion, it might well blind me to what's really going on.  It's never a good idea to jump from "I don't see how this could be true" to "this isn't true."  It's just a thinly-disguised version of the argument from ignorance, isn't it?  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Going from an abject statement of ignorance to an abject statement of certainty."

As far as what Mossbridge is actually claiming, it's more than a little fascinating.  She writes:

I led a team at the respected Northwestern University in the U.S. that analysed 26 experiments published over the previous 32 years, all of which examined the claim that human physiology can predict future important or emotional events. 

These studies had asked questions such as: ‘Do our bodies give different unconscious signals when we’re about to see a picture of someone pointing a gun at us, versus when we’re about to see a picture of a flower?’ 

In all of the experiments we analysed, a random number generator was used to select the future image so it was impossible to cheat.  The answer, our research concluded, is ‘yes’.  When you add all these experiments together, it became clear the human body goes through changes in advance of future important events — alerting our non-conscious minds seconds earlier to what is likely to happen. 

On average, participants’ bodies showed changes that were statistically reliable.  For instance, they would sweat more (a behaviour associated with fear) before they were shown an image of a gun, and less before they saw a flower. 

This happened too often to be scientifically considered chance.

All of this, of course, runs counter to the sense most of us have that time flow is one-directional.  How could the future influence the present?  But as Mossbridge correctly points out, the "arrow of time" problem is one of the great unsolved mysteries of physics.  Virtually all of the physicists' equations are time-symmetric -- the math works equally well whether time is flowing forward or backward.   One of the only exceptions is entropy -- which deserves a bit more explanation.

We observe that systems tend to progress toward more chaotic (high entropy) states.  A glass breaks, but the pieces never spontaneously come together and reassemble into a glass.  The sugar you've stirred into your coffee never comes back together into solid crystals sitting at the bottom of the cup.  Why is that?

The simplest explanation of this can be illustrated using a deck of cards.  If you were to shuffle an ordinary deck, what's the likelihood that (by random chance) they'd end up in numerical order by suit?

Nearly zero, of course.  The reason is that there are only 24 different states where they are organized that way (depending on the order of the suits), whereas there is a nearly infinite number of possible other arrangements.  So if you jump from one arrangement to another (by shuffling), the chance of landing on one of the 24 ordered states is very close to zero.  Progression toward disorder is the rule because, in general, there are way more disordered states than ordered ones.

But this still doesn't explain all of the other cases where time is completely symmetric.  Why do we remember the past but know nothing about the future?  The simple answer is that no one knows.  Einstein himself said, "The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, although a remarkably stubborn one."

So I'm curious to find out more of what Mossbridge is claiming.  And I'll soon have my chance, as I just ordered her new book The Premonition Code, which details the evidence that has convinced her and others that precognition actually exists.  (If you'd like to order the book as well, click the image below.)

 

Until then, I have to say the jury's still out on this one.  I'm trying to push aside both the disbeliever and the mystic that cohabit in my brain, and stick with the skeptic -- look at the argument as dispassionately as I can, and see where it leads.  Faced with a huge, mysterious, and complex universe, that's about the best we can ever do.

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You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

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

**********************************

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!]

Dream a little dream of me

I got a "what do you think of this?" sort of email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday, along with a link to an article over at Collective Evolution entitled, "Scientist Demonstrates Fascinating Evidence of Precognitive Dreaming."

I tried not to read it with my scoffer-hat on.  I have to admit, though, that my immediate bias is to disbelieve in precognition of any sort -- if there was true precognition, there'd be no cases of psychics getting in car accidents and lots of cases of psychics winning the lottery.  Also, there's the troubling lack of a mechanism by which this could happen; regardless of where you fall on the free-will-versus-determinism spectrum, the one-way flow of time seems to preclude information of any kind going the other way (although it must be admitted up front that the "arrow of time" problem -- why time is asymmetrical, moving only one direction -- is a perplexing conundrum in physics that is far from settled).

So I tried to keep my mind open, but not so far open that my brains fell out.  And here's what I learned.

Stanley Krippner, professor of psychology at Saybrook University (Oakland, California), and was curious about the alleged phenomenon of precognitive dreams.  So he set up an experiment as follows, described in an interview with Geraldine Cremine of Vice Motherboard:

Each night, the subject dreamer would go through an ordinary night of dreaming, with an intent to dream about an experience he would have the following morning.  The dreamer was woken 4-5 times throughout the night to relay his dreams to an experimenter.  The following mornings, experimenters randomly selected an experience from a number of prearranged options, and the dreamer was subjected to that experience.  Dr. Krippner said there was no way for the participants to know what experience they would encounter before it was selected and administered.

One participant stood out.  He dreamed of birds several nights in a row, and the randomly-selected video and audio he was presented with was -- bird songs.

Job's Evil Dream, by William Blake (1805) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Of course, you don't get very far by picking out the bit of your data that conforms best to your hypothesis, and putting all the weight on that.  But according to Krippner, the independent judges who evaluated the evidence found at least one correspondence between the dream content and the video or audio experience they were given the next morning.

Okay, this experiment does have something going for it, at least over the anecdotal, after-the-fact reporting that most instances of alleged precognition rely on.  The fact that the experience the next morning was chosen at random, and thus was uninfluenced by what the dreamer's reported dream content was, is certainly suggestive.  Having independent evaluators analyze the dreams and the experiences and see if there was a correlation is certainly better than having it done by someone with a preconceived notion of what they were going to find.

But... the problem with this study is the same one that plagues all dream-content studies; there's a relatively small number of dream types, and we all tend to dream about the same stuff.  Friends, family, being in danger (e.g. being chased, falling, being held captive), not to mention the inevitable erotic dreams we all have from time to time.  So in general terms, if you have the video/audio experience reflect any of these, chances are there'll be correlations at some point.

It very much remains to be seen if the number, and specificity, of those correlations was significantly over what you'd expect from chance alone.

Then Krippner does something that I find absolutely maddening; attributing the effect to quantum physics.  Krippner says,  "Quantum events happen on a different time scale to what most people live and experience in the West.  We have this understanding of time that is: ‘past, present, future.’ But quantum physics gives you a different concept of time."

Predictably, this made me weep softly while banging my head on the keyboard.

Quantum events happen on a different scale than we're used to, kind of by definition; quantum mechanics describes the behavior of matter and energy on the submicroscopic scales.  Yes, it's counterintuitive, even if you're not here "in the West."  But quantum effects such as entanglement are so difficult to observe in the macroscopic world that it's only in the last few years that physicists have been able to demonstrate conclusively that they exist.  The idea that entanglement explains why I and a friend showed up at work yesterday wearing nearly identical shirts is blatantly idiotic.

Actually, it's worse than that; it's lazy.  Instead of doing the hard work to learn some quantum physics -- an endeavor that would rapidly put to rest any idea that it has to do with dreams -- Krippner just goes, "Blah blah dreaming blah blah shamanic consciousness blah blah quantum mechanics," and people apparently just nod and say, "Cool.  Makes sense."

So the problem here is twofold.  One piece is to demonstrate that there's anything here to study, something that could be established by replicating Krippner's dreaming experiment and seeing if you get the same results.  This should be straightforward enough; after all, the experiment doesn't require much in the way of sophisticated technology.

But the second problem is the tendency of people to take stuff like this and run right off a cliff with it.  It's no different than young-Earth creationists saying that scientists say the Big Bang means "nothing exploded and made everything" and evolution means "humans evolved from a rock" (both statements are, by the way, direct quotes from creationists I've run into online).  A very brief amount of research would establish that in neither case have scientists claimed anything of the kind.  So if you're going to use scientific research, either to support/explain some claim of yours or to argue against one you'd like to disprove, then for cryin' in the sink find out what the scientists are actually saying.  It's way more interesting than the shallow, screwy misconceptions you often hear people trumpet, and it'll keep you from making silly mistakes and discrediting your entire argument.

Which, I'm afraid, is exactly what Stanley Krippner did.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

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

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.

Secular indoctrination and spoon-bending

It used to be that when I was accused (usually because I teach evolution) of "indoctrinating students into a secular, materialist, rationalist worldview," that it would set my teeth on edge.

And yes, the above is an actual quote.  However, the same charge has been levied against me, and other science teachers, using a variety of verbiage.  Teachers should not teach students to doubt, to question authority.  By adhering to an evidence-based, rationalistic approach, we are calling into question faith and spirituality.

Worse still, public schools are "atheist factories."

On one hand, I question the extent to which teachers really can create seismic shifts in students' worldviews.  With very few exceptions, the kids in my classes who come in religious, agnostic, and atheist leave my classes (respectively) religious, agnostic, and atheist.  It takes more than forty minutes a day for 180 days to undermine an entire belief system, even if that was my goal (which, incidentally, it isn't).

On the other hand, though, the critics do have a point.  We science teachers are promoting rationalism as a path to knowledge.  And we damn well should be.  Rationalism has provided us with the medical advances, engineering, and technology that the majority of us are happy enough to use without question, regardless of the fact that they were produced by a methodology that has nothing whatsoever to do with faith or divine inspiration.  If you want to call what I do "indoctrination into a rationalistic worldview," then have at it.

What's funny is that a lot of the extremely religious get their knickers in a twist if someone steps in and tries to teach students a different spiritual, non-evidence-based set of beliefs.  It's okay to let religion into public schools, apparently, as long as it's the right religion.

As an example, consider the odd bedfellows that have resulted from decision by the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics to allow a self-styled psychic to come in and teach telepathy and telekinesis to high school students.  (Hat tip to the wonderful site Doubtful News for this story.)

Here's how the story was reported:

Mentalist and mind reader Gerard Senehi recently partnered with the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics to offer classes meant to help students develop life skills like self-confidence and answer tough questions about themselves, such as “Do you have the courage to pursue what you really care about?” and “How much do you have a sense of direction and purpose in life?” 

The program, called The QUESTion Project, kicked off with a Dec. 19 performance at the school where Senehi dazzled students with tricks like bending wine glasses, spinning spoons in other people’s hands and making accurate predictions about the future. 

Edward Tom, the school’s founding principal, was also impressed by how well Senehi managed to keep the students’ attention. "The whole purpose wasn’t to give kids a magic show," he said. "It was to let them know the power of belief, that there are so many things that are possible…"

No, Mr. Tom, you're right about that.  It isn't a magic show.  In a magic show, the magician is clear on the fact that what (s)he is doing is an illusion.  Senehi claims that what he's doing is real.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This has appalled a number of people, including the very religious (who don't want evil stuff like psychic powers influencing teenagers) and secular rationalists (who are appalled that such claptrap is being presented as reality, and in a science center, no less).  Both, of course, are right, although in different senses.  Such a performance could influence students' beliefs.  Stage magicians (which Senehi is, even if he won't admit it) can be terribly convincing.  They only become famous if they're good enough that you can't see how they do what they do.  Presented with an inexplicable trick, and the message, "You can learn how to do this, if you try hard enough!", I can see how people (not just teenagers!) could get suckered.

Which is why people like Senehi should not be allowed anywhere near school-age children.  Adults sometimes have a hard enough time telling fact from fantasy; encouraging teenagers to further blur this distinction is irresponsible.

Magician and skeptic Jamy Ian Swiss put it most succinctly.  In a piece about Senehi, Swiss said, "If you tell the audience you’re doing anything other than tricks, …you’re not doing entertainment. You’re doing religion."

And to anyone who objects to his characterization of what Senehi is doing as religion, allow me to point out that as a set of bizarre claims with zero evidence, psychic beliefs are clearly religion.

So to the people who would eliminate "rationalist indoctrination" from science classrooms, let me ask: what would you put in its place?  If we allow spiritualistic and faith-based beliefs to guide what we do in schools, we have stepped onto that fabled slippery slope.  Do you really want kids to sit through presentations by people who claim that they can learn how to do telepathy and bend spoons with their minds?  Are you honestly comfortable with allowing any and all faith-based belief systems to guide instruction?

If not, maybe the safest thing for all of us is to let science teachers keep on with the rationalism, and leave the faith stuff -- of all flavors -- to the homes and the churches.

Grist for the mill

Over the Thanksgiving holiday we were in Northampton, Massachusetts visiting family, and we took the opportunity to visit an amazing used bookstore called The Bookmill, in Montague.

[image courtesy of photographer John Phelan and the Wikimedia Commons]

The Bookmill is sited in an old mill house on the Sawmill River, and bills itself as "books you don't need in a place you can't find."  We found it anyhow, and spent a diverting couple of hours wandering around its maze of little wood-floored rooms and creaking, narrow staircases, and (of course) came away with a box full of books, which we did too need, thank you very much.

For my son Nathan: a book on quantum physics and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy.  For my wife Carol: several books of poetry and essays.  For me, on the other hand, three masterpieces:

• Ghosts Among Us: Eyewitness Accounts of True Hauntings, by Harry Ludlum
• UFOs and How to See Them, by Jenny Randles
• How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy, and Clairvoyance, by W. E. Butler

All of this elicited a great amount of eye-rolling on the part of various family members.  Myself, I was thrilled, and these books will now occupy a nice spot on my bookshelf next to Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life by Ivan T. Sanderson.

But not, of course, before I entertain you with a few excerpts.

From Ghosts Among Us, we read the following, in a story called "The Council House Horrors:"

A family of four, a couple and their grown-up son and daughter, living in a post-war council house in Swindon, Wiltshire, were rehoused when it was feared they were heading for nervous breakdowns. 

First, Mrs. Gladys Tucker saw the shadow of a man standing on the landing.  Then all manner of strange things began to happen.  Objects moved themselves mysteriously; windows that should have been shut were found open; door handles raised and lowered themselves.  Apparitions of animals were seen.  The daughter saw strange lights on her bed and bedroom walls.  The son was held pinned to a wall by an unseen force. 

The daughter was driven to seeing a nerve specialist, while the son was so shaken that he left home to live with a relation. 

When their father, Mr. Herbert Tucker, a storekeeper, now deeply concerned for the health of his wife and daughter, called on the council for help, police went over the house thoroughly and the local electricity board inspected wires and lights, but they found nothing.

Because that's a logical thing to do if your kid is "pinned to a wall by an unseen force."  "Well, Mr. Tucker, your son may have been thrown against a wall by an evil spirit, but your wires and breaker boxes look fine.  I'll leave you with my bill, shall I?"

We are told that the Tuckers moved out, but were followed by other tenants who had bizarre experiences, including seeing the ghost of a dead window-washer who had fallen and broken his neck, and a specter of a headless girl.  But eventually the whole thing died down, presumably because the ghosts got bored and moved to somewhere nicer than a "post-war council house."


Now, let's turn to my second find, UFOs and How to See Them.  My first thought, on picking this one up, was, "How can you write an instruction manual on how to see UFOs?  It's not like they come when called, or anything."  But this is exactly what Ms. Randles has set out to do.  In it, we read such tantalizing hints as:

• UFOs are often sighted near geologic fault zones
• UFOs are more likely to be seen after cold fronts pass through an area
• Crop circles are left behind by aliens as an intelligence test
• William Shatner got lost on his motorcycle in the Mojave Desert, and was guided to safety by a "silvery UFO"
• Ezekiel's visions in the bible were UFO sightings
• "City folk are largely unobservant.  A giant UFO could drift overhead and many of them would never see it!"

So there you are, then.  To her credit, Ms. Randles does give a lot of information on "IFOs" -- "identified flying objects."  She tells you how to recognize known phenomena, so you are less likely to be fooled if you see a weather balloon, a distant jet, a bird, or the planet Venus.  So that's all to the good, although I do sort of wish the aliens had left William Shatner out there in the desert.

Then we have the amazing How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy, and Clairvoyance, the book that was thrown across the room in disgust by my brother-in-law after reading the following:

The etheric vision is sometimes called "X ray vision" as it allows its possessor to see through physical matter.  In the early days of mesmerism it was developed for the medical diagnosis of diseases, and since the etheric clairvoyant can, in some cases, apparently see into the interior of the human body and closely observe the working of its various organs, it is easy to see how very helpful this form of clairvoyance can be.

My sense is that it wouldn't be so much "helpful" as "disgusting," but that's just me.

Of course, I was curious about auras, and so I turned to the chapter called "What is the Aura?" to read the following:

... (T)he aura is defined as "a subtle invisible essence or fluid said to emanate from human and animal bodies, and even from things; a psychic electro-vital, electro-mental effluvium, partaking of both mind and body, hence the atmosphere surrounding a person..."  The aura is usually seen as a luminous atmosphere around all living things, including what we regard as inanimate matter.

So, living things, including non-living things.  Got it.

Nathan's comment about the above was that if you're experiencing an electro-mental effluvium, you should probably see a doctor.  I replied that he only thought that because he had a puce-colored aura.


Anyhow.  If you're ever in northwestern Massachusetts, you should definitely visit The Bookmill.  You probably won't find books as entertaining as the three I bought, but I'm sure you'll come away with something awesome.