Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  Josephson, a Nobel Prize winner, is an avowed believer in telepathy. (In this chapter, I use the umbrella term psi, which includes telepathy and covers any theoretical ability to gather accurate information outside our five normal sensory pathways.) Claims of psi-ability have been with us for millennia. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that, in 550 B.C., the Oracle at Delphi predicted precisely when the king of Lydia would be boiling a lamb and a tortoise in a brass cauldron. Hardly as valuable as predicting, say, the winner of the Super Bowl. Still, the Oracle got gold and silver for her trouble.

  Today, in the modern West, psychics can also earn their share of filthy lucre. But the mainstream view of psi is contentious, to say the least, and Josephson’s full-bodied embrace of psi is surprising—not least because he could easily have continued down the less nettlesome path he had forged for himself. As a graduate student, Josephson had correctly predicted that a phenomenon called “quantum tunneling” was more powerful than previously thought. His research led to Josephson Junctions, in which two layers of superconducting material sandwich a (very) thin layer of nonconducting material. This construction allowed electron pairs to “tunnel” from one side to the other, leading to a vast array of practical applications, like microchips and MRI machines. In short, Josephson’s discovery is among the most important technological leaps of the past half-century. But because of his interest in psi, some now portrayed him as a figure of disrepute. He had gone “off the rails,” they claimed in the wake of his offensive sentence, his intellect somehow damaged by his long-running study of telepathy.

  “It is utter rubbish,” David Deutsch, a quantum physics expert at Oxford University, told the Observer newspaper. “Telepathy simply does not exist.”

  BBC Radio invited Josephson to defend his position against two skeptics—the key one, for our purposes, being American James Randi. A former stage magician, Randi has been debunking all things paranormal for roughly forty years. And given the opportunity to confront Josephson, he attacked. The magician accused the physicist of invoking the “refuge of scoundrels” in referring to quantum mechanics and further claimed there was “no firm evidence” for telepathy a reputable scientist would accept. But there is a problem here. Because the evidence submitted for psi is vast, and so competently assembled, some more fair-minded skeptics have been forced to concede important ground. “I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven,” says psychologist and skeptic Richard Wiseman, in a January 2008 edition of the Daily Mail.

  Remote Viewing (RV) is the claim of a real Mind’s Eye—the ability to see things and describe them accurately without being bodily present to see them at all. This seemed a startling admission. And Wiseman was asked to clarify. As expected, he claimed to have been misquoted—but not in the way we might think. He wasn’t referring only to remote viewing, he said. He was describing the entire field of telepathy—or psi research in general. What’s more, fellow U.K. skeptic Chris French agrees with him. “I think Richard’s right,” he told me. “For an ordinary claim, the evidence we already have would be sufficient.”

  The issue, as described by both Wiseman and French, is that telepathy is no ordinary claim. The finding of an as yet undiscovered sensory capacity might force us to question all kinds of scientific truths—in physics and neuroscience, just for starters. So, the thinking goes, the evidence provided for telepathy must be as extraordinary as the claim itself. Which, they maintain, it isn’t.

  It seems, then, when the evidence for psi is closely reviewed, the reputation of Brian Josephson can safely be removed from hell (the Landing Place of Scoundrels) and cast into purgatory (the Landing Place of Stuff We’re Still Debating). What we’ll learn here, in the muddled middle, is that psi proponents and naysayers seem diametrically opposed—like rival families in the Ozarks, pop-eyed with adrenaline that can only come from really, really wanting to shoot someone else in the heart. But truth be told, the skeptics are far more like the believers than they first appear. And in a very real sense, psychic slayers and psychic supporters are, shockingly, both right.

  I WALKED TO MY first session of the Parapsychological Association’s (PA) summer 2009 meeting through a light Seattle mist. Though I knew that most of the leading researchers in the field of parapsychology would be here, I didn’t know quite what to expect. This was an academic conference, and the talks promised to be incredibly technical. But I did have an impromptu introduction to one of the weekend’s speakers. I had checked into a dormitory on the University of Seattle campus the previous night and run into a big, bald-headed man out by the elevators. The hallway was cramped, and we were ostensibly here for the same reason, so I introduced myself.

  “How you doing Steve!” the man replied, pumping my outstretched hand as if we were old friends. Before I knew it, I’d been invited to sit at a desk in the tiny dorm room of Paul H. Smith, a former military man who had carried out remote viewing trials for the U.S. Army.

  I’d come here, I thought, with an open mind. I’d read the scientific literature on remote viewing, pro and con. I knew the Army really did have a remote viewing program, investing money and facilities in a network of psychic spies. But until I sat with Smith, those were just words on a page. Remote viewing is such a strange idea. Theoretically, a viewer can “see” things with his or her mind—no matter how many miles away, underwater, inside cabinet drawers, and even in outer space. Not even time is a factor, as proponents of remote viewing claim to see the past and the future. Confronted by Smith, I was a little dumbfounded that this big, matter-of-fact Texan was here, talking to me about mind sight.

  “I was skeptical about it, too, when I started,” Smith told me. “But I wanted to see if it was real.”

  I wondered if I was smirking at him. Because seeing things at a distance just didn’t fit into my own personal experience, and seeing someone up close who claims to see things at a distance felt even stranger. I’d imagined that recruitment into this odd military experiment was conducted with equal weirdness. Perhaps the sergeant in charge read his morning coffee grounds? But Smith had been brought aboard after a couple of innocuous conversations with a neighbor on the Fort George G. Meade military base. The neighbor was involved in the remote viewing program, a fact he concealed from Smith. But when he saw Smith had some talent for drawing, he tapped him for a tryout. Over the next couple of years, Smith put his artistic talent to use—trying to see unknown targets with his mind’s eye and sketch them for his superiors. He had his share of success, he told me. And on that first night in Seattle, we talked for more than an hour—me mostly feeling odd that Smith himself seemed so credible, a plainspoken Texan who retained the upright bearing and polite demeanor of a career soldier.

  The next morning, after worrying about whether or not my skepticism had shown, I kept looking in vain for some crowd of people all headed in the same direction, figuring they would lead me to the first conference session. But no crowd ever materialized. And it was only after I saw Smith walking across campus with the steady gait of a soldier that I found my way. The conference organizers at the Parapsychological Association had warned me the gathering would be small. Just how small came as something of a shock. I counted maybe thirty people on hand for the morning’s first presentation, a panel dealing with the role that belief systems play in science. “Dick Shoup continues to work on psi-related issues, undistracted by any significant funding,” read the bio of one of the panel’s participants.

  The line got a nice laugh from the audience and set the tone for a real budget catering affair, all of it held in one college lecture hall, with a table out front at the breaks holding bottles of water, raisins, and the occasional cookie. In my capacity as a journalist, I’ve attended enough professional functions to know where the money is (trial attorneys throw the fanciest parties). And clearly, I found, there is no money in psi research.

  On one level, this might not be so surprising. After all, the participants had arrived to spend the wee
kend discussing a phenomenon many don’t believe exists. Perhaps more commonly known under the heading of ESP, or extrasensory perception, the Greek letter psi is employed by physicists to depict a quantum mechanical wave function, and by paranormalists to cover four main areas of research: telepathy, or a connection between separate minds; clairvoyance, or “clear seeing,” which would encompass remote viewing; precognition, somehow perceiving events in the future; and psychokinesis, or PK, which might mean bending a spoon or influencing the output of a random number generator, affecting the physical world using only the power of our consciousness.

  The attempt by paranormalists to co-opt a term employed by physicists probably speaks to two things: one, they think the mechanism by which a “sixth sense” works is physical, and scientific, not immaterial and unverifiable; two, they need, want, wish, long for the imprimatur of mainstream science.

  In his 1979 paper, “Experimental Parapsychology as a Rejected Science,” University of Pennsylvania sociologist Paul D. Allison surveyed members of the Parapsychological Association. What he found was a small group of dedicated and demonstrably qualified psi researchers who reported that they had been routinely discriminated against by their mainstream, university bosses in hiring, promotions, publications, and funding research.

  Thirty years later, after eating my share of raisins at the PA’s small, dispirited annual conference, I wondered if anything had substantively changed. I contacted Allison, who dug up a draft of the questionnaire he submitted. I reshaped it as an online survey, had a techie friend slap it on the Internet, and asked the PA’s current membership to respond.

  What I found is that the relationship between psi researchers and mainstream science remains the same: more than half of my subjects felt they had been discriminated against or were aware of some kind of discrimination having been waged against a psi researcher. That figure was down only marginally from Allison’s survey. Further, nearly half of my respondents felt they had been denied funding or facilities for the crime of studying psi. I received just thirty responses, less than half of what Allison got. But these self-reports matched the downbeat parapsychogical procession I had witnessed with my own eyes. And maybe that is to be expected. Maybe parapsychologists don’t deserve funding. Maybe this state of affairs shows how well science works, and nothing has changed substantially in the way parapsychologists are treated because their findings remain stagnant. But that seems an unlikely answer. Because their findings have changed—a lot.

  There are several major areas of psi research. But I’ll quickly sketch out three here. (Readers interested in exploring the research personally should consult my Notes and Sources section, which includes information on many studies, the vast majority of which were published in the past twenty years.) Let’s start with remote viewing, one of the most prominent and successful areas of psi research to emerge in the past three decades. The military conducted a lot of its own experiments to see whether remote viewing worked.The protocol the Army employed went something like this: a viewer in training is set up at a table. His supervisor gives him some minimal piece of information, like latitude and longitude coordinates, or merely tells him to focus on “the target,” without being given the foggiest clue what the target might be. The viewer is supplied with a pen and paper to record his or her presumably psychic impressions, usually in a sketch. In these trials, any written impressions produced by the viewer—in words or pictures—are given to an independent judge. The judge is also supplied with four photos, one of which displays the target. The judge, blinded to the true target, then matches the viewer’s report to the image he feels it most closely resembles, giving any viewer a 25 percent shot at scoring a hit purely by chance.

  In practical applications of remote viewing, the Army simply took what information the RVer provided and looked for anything that might contain actionable intelligence. Few dispute that the Army’s remote viewers occasionally scored remarkable hits or dazzle shots along with their misses. Pat Price accurately described a military installation, including some current and past activities and even the site’s code name. Joe McMoneagle, one of the most (in)famous RVers, was asked to see the content of an airplane hangar. In this instance, he was even given a photo of the hangar’s exterior. His handlers were trying to fool him, figuring he might start drawing pictures of airplanes. Instead, he drew a tank parked inside the hangar, accurately depicting the vehicle’s interior, including laser range-finding equipment, visual systems to compensate for low-visibility conditions, and cutting-edge computers.

  McMoneagle also accurately described the contents of a building on a Soviet naval base on the Baltic Sea. Military analysts initially scoffed at what he came up with—a submarine far bigger than any then known, with a set of missile tubes located, contrary to standard design, in front of the conning tower. But later, satellite photos proved him right. He had apparently described the Typhoon, a super-secret Soviet sub.

  Skeptics might explain these kinds of dramatic successes as the product of basic probability laws—make enough drawings of enough targets and you’re bound to get something right. Or perhaps the details, in these particularly evocative cases, had somehow been leaked to the viewers. But this is far from the last word. The Army’s RVers didn’t just capture dazzle shots. In fact, analysis of their work suggested they were producing accurate information at a rate significantly above chance. And in one analysis, skeptics and believers came awfully close to lying down together. In fact, skeptic Ray Hyman wrote in his “Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena” that the results he saw could not, in his estimation, be put down to chance or any methodological flaw he could find. He refrained from calling psi an established fact by only the thinnest of margins—positing that some methodological flaw might be discovered in the future.

  Since then, the state of play has remained much the same, and the storm of debate in psi research has often revolved around meta-analyses. A meta-analysis is, in essence, a study of studies. Take a stack of related research findings, conduct a rigorous statistical analysis, and read the numbers. Well, meta-analyses of what’s known as the Ganzfeld database tend to show evidence for the unbelievable. In Ganzfeld tests, receivers sit with halved Ping-Pong balls taped over their eyes and plugs in their ears, then try to pick up accurate information. Proponents say that cutting off the normal sensory channels allows other information to come through—like a radio antennae plucking the signal from noise.

  Performing a meta-analysis on this research, one of the most well-known scientists working in parapsychology, Dean Radin, found a 32 percent hit rate when 25 percent is expected by chance. He calculated the odds against chance for the positive results at 29 quintillion to 1. But the single most promising area for further research may lie in “brain correlation” experiments.

  These studies go by different names, which rigorously avoid the dreaded T word, because the mere mention of telepathy is likely to draw emotional fire from someone’s amygdala, somewhere. (Case in point: British parapsychologist Guy Lyon Playfair tells a very funny story about attempting to study psychic functioning in twins. Instead of using the word telepathy, he tried to placate the mainstream by declaring he was studying “biological correlates of empathy.”)

  In most of these studies, two subjects, usually with some prior personal connection, are separated and rigged up in skullcaps designed to monitor their brain waves. While one subject, the “receiver,” sits in a bland featureless room with nothing much happening, the “sender” is exposed to stimuli. The idea is to see whether the introduction of a stimulus to the “sender” produces a corresponding reaction in the receiver’s brain. Will agitation in the sender, or for that matter pleasure, be mimicked in the brain of their partner? Dean Radin has collected thirty-three of these experiments, the majority conducted since 1994, with strongly positive results for the presence of brain correlation—which we’ll bravely call telepathy.

  This is a drop in the scientific bucket, of course. When a field
is really accepted, studies might more likely number in the hundreds—another sign of how psi remains ghettoized, or how far it still has to go.

  There are small signs we might someday see a shift. Earlier, I mentioned that skeptics Wiseman and French had been gracious enough to admit the obvious: psi researchers have lots of good evidence. The question is whether or not they have enough. Perhaps even more incredibly, one of this country’s most vocal atheists, Sam Harris, in the End of Faith, acknowledges the research for psi is so compelling that telepathy may need to be admitted into the canon of accepted knowledge. And there is more. Along the way, I spoke to Dr. Michael Persinger, a real gadfly to paranormal believers. Persinger is in most respects a kind of happy naysayer—no to God, no to ghosts—but he also happens to be a strong proponent of psi; and he was in the process of publishing his research on what he calls “the Harribance Effect.”

  Working with an under-the-radar psychic named Sean Harribance, Persinger claims to have found a pattern of brain activity that correlates with psychic functioning. “Here’s the really exciting part,” he says. “Here’s the wow. When Harribance has actually gotten correct information, his brain state corresponds demonstrably with that of the person he’s reading.”

  Harribance spoke to me at length over the phone but wouldn’t agree to see me in person. “I’m not interested in publicity,” he told me, multiple times.

  Clearly, something is happening here in the land of psi. And inexplicable results should be the ones that pique a scientist’s interest most. But once a subject has acquired what I call “the Paranormal Taint,” mainstream science tends to run in the other direction. As I see it, the Paranormal Taint is itself harmless, inert, and value neutral. But some people still regard the Taint either as a sign of holiness or toxicity, depending upon their point of view.