by Steve Volk
Susan Blackmore is something of a lioness in skeptical circles, a prize not only because she writes with grace and wit but because of her compelling autobiography. Dear Susan, it seems, was once one of them—a paranormalist. She has claimed she wanted to be a “famous parapsychologist.” And in her essay, “The Elusive Open Mind: Ten Years of Negative Research in Parapsychology,” she writes convincingly of her frustrating inability to demonstrate a psi effect. By her own account, her failed experiments convinced her that the skeptics were right: psi is the ghost in the machine—and no, ghosts don’t exist either.
That really is a compelling autobiography. But her tale is not without its problems. For starters, researcher Rick E. Berger went looking through Blackmore’s work and found the ten years of research she claimed in her article was actually conducted in just two or three years. Further, when her entire body of research was taken into account, she had found a demonstrable psi effect, with odds against chance of 20,000 to 1. Berger found that Blackmore had thrown out her own positive studies, ostensibly for shoddy methodology, but kept her negative results even when they demonstrated the same control problems.
To be clear, Berger and Blackmore both contend her work was so poorly designed as to be worthless in drawing a conclusion about the existence of psi (Blackmore differs with him on several of his other criticisms, too). But I do think we gain great psychological insight into the believer/skeptic dynamic by considering just what in hell Blackmore must have been thinking all these years. Why would she disregard her own positive results? Why wouldn’t she simply improve her controls and keep working?
There may be a clue in her desire to be “famous.” I met no stars in Seattle. I was one of a small handful of people in attendance without a direct professional connection to the field. Many of the presentations were attended by just two dozen people. By contrast, Randi’s annual Amazing Meeting, the kind of skeptic’s fest at which Blackmore is a regular, draws a huge crowd of bloggers, writers, and podcasters—and their fans. The July 2010 Amazing Meeting drew more than one thousand people, roughly ten times the number that attended the Parapsychological Association’s tepid fête. The woman who wanted to be a famous parapsychologist may simply have found the going too hard, the prospects of becoming famous too remote. In a 1995 Skeptical Inquirer article she states, “I am skeptical because believing in psi does not get me anywhere.” She goes on to argue that believing in psi doesn’t help her understand the universe or other mysteries, but I wonder: cognitive psychologists operate on the premise that the behaviors we engage in, the beliefs we hold, all provide some kind of payoff—be it financial, physical, or emotional. From this point of view, Blackmore’s famous conversion to skepticism may simply have offered her the payoffs she desired. Skepticism got her to where she wanted to be.
Richard Wiseman is another skeptical luminary. He goes out of his way, at times, to be fair—admitting some success in psi research, for instance. But he has also been accused of distorting the subject. In the episode I find most intriguing, he followed up on research conducted by Harvard-educated historian and biochemist Rupert Sheldrake. The topic was, of all things, a dog. Sheldrake had recently conducted experiments in which a dog, Jaytee, seemed to know precisely when its owner would be coming home. Again and again, in randomized experiments, just after its owner started back to the house, the dog would stop whatever it was doing and go sit by the window. Wiseman subsequently conducted a smaller series of trials with Jaytee. His data proved almost identical to Sheldrake’s. Yet he went on to make the argument that his own findings disproved the biochemist’s claims. He admitted the statistical similarity of their findings recently, when cornered by Alex Tsakiris on his Skeptiko podcast.
On a personal level, I relate to Wiseman. I have a hard time believing in psychic pooches and would like to see more evidence. (My own dog always sat in the same spot right before I came home from school, too; so hey, who knows?) That said, I think that distorting the data that does exist is counterproductive. And the lesson is that, in addition to being wary of supposedly psychic dogs, we should also be skeptical of skeptics.
CSICOP changed its name in 2006, to CSI—the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. They publicly claimed they liked the new name’s brevity. But it also seems that, by dropping the word science from their name, they gain a freer hand to put forth a materialist philosophy without the bother of employing the scientific method. They also captured the aura of the many TV shows airing under that banner that purport to uncover the truth through scientific inquiry. (Ironically, every major felony trail I cover as a reporter includes some warning from the prosecutor that CSI is fiction, and such a high level of scientific evidence doesn’t exist in the real world of criminal court proceedings. So maybe the skeptics’ invocation of a show broadcasting an unrealistic view is spot on.) Randi remains listed as a fellow. But today he is probably most famous for running the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), and his promotional vehicle—the Paranormal Challenge. For roughly forty years, Randi has offered to pay anyone who can prove a paranormal claim. He still has the money, now more than a million dollars.And to many of his admirers in the skeptical community this is clear proof that the paranormal must not exist. But the Paranormal Challenge, too, is more sideshow than science.
For starters, the testing protocols Randi agrees to require evidence far beyond what a scientist would demand to admit a significant positive result.
Brian Josephson, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist with whom this chapter started, has noted the case of a Russian girl with a supposed gift for diagnosing medical illnesses. She agreed to the challenge and went 4 for 7 in her testing—a remarkable hit rate. Yet she was deemed a failure because the protocol demanded she get five correct.
“The case of the Russian girl was unfortunate,” admits Chris French, perhaps the most level-headed skeptic on the scene. “The skeptics came off looking rather bad there. Her results were remarkable enough that they should have said, ‘Well, whatever the protocol, we should take another look at her.’ ”
The problem is that French is speaking as a reasonable man who believes the girl would have failed by a wider, less disputable margin in a second go. Randi isn’t operating from that kind of mindset. He even involved himself in the Jaytee research, claiming, among other things, that the JREF had investigated dog telepathy and found it to be false. Sheldrake said he then asked for copies of Randi’s research but was told any records were informal and now, um, gone. Not exactly science.
In 2005, University of Arizona parapsychologist Gary Schwartz claimed that Randi asked him to submit his raw data, which demonstrated a psi effect, for an independent analysis. According to Schwartz, Randi listed psi-sympathetic researcher Stanley Krippner as one of the four reviewers he had lined up. But when Schwartz tried to verify Krippner’s participation directly, Krippner told him the opposite: he had refused Randi’s request to serve on the independent review board.
It seems to me that any truly rational group would not have James Randi as a member. But there is something very revealing in the Randi saga: that the little magician has been allowed to behave this way by fellow professional skeptics and the crowd of rationalists that follow their work is a testament to one thing only: our common humanity. Skeptics, after all, are believers, too. But believing in the power of science isn’t actually doing science. The scientific method is itself impartial—but it is no antidote for the very human frailty of ignoring the information we don’t like and embracing the information we do.
Gallup polls in 2001 and 2005 show paranormal belief has generally trended up in recent years, even as Randi has been casting spells for rational thinking. And a recent article in Current Research in Social Psychology, titled “Social Influences on Paranormal Belief,” found that when participants were told mainstream science rejects a claim, they became more likely to accept the claim as true! “This finding ran counter to our expectations,” write the authors, “but is consistent with findings that trust
in science is decreasing.”
Randi and the skeptics make a living posing as the figures who protect us all from irrationality and unreason. But they don’t seem to have done the job. And there is nothing at all scientific and even less that is reasonable about distorting or ignoring data. Besides, when it comes to telepathy, the skeptics seem particularly extreme—because what they have been “protecting” us from, all these years, is in fact laughably small.
PERHAPS THE MOST TELLING presentation at the Seattle conference occurred near the end.
Charles Tart, an academic psychologist, received a career achievement award. He walked up to the podium to speak, smiling. But it seemed a number of members preferred he not show up at all. Tart’s latest book, The End of Materialism, is titled in a way seemingly designed to piss off the skeptics. But in Seattle he seemed bent on pissing off his colleagues in parapsychology, too—and for the very same reasons.
A long, lean, boyish, and playful kid in his early seventies, Tart chuckled his way through a talk that had his colleagues shifting uncomfortably in their seats. “We believe in God,” he told them. “The skeptics have found us out, and we can’t fool ’em so we might as well admit it.”
Tart intended this as a laugh line, and in a sense it worked. He laughed. But the fact, and he knows it, is that modern parapsychologists don’t fit his description. Less than a third of the respondents to my recasting of the Allison survey, for instance, “agreed strongly” with the statement, “The results of parapsychological research clearly indicate that there is a nonmaterial basis of life or thought.”
Fewer than a quarter strongly agreed with the statement, “Consciousness continues in some form, after death, and includes memory and the retention of a sense of self.”
Parapsychologists are so utterly not New Age adherents that Tart, with his deep and abiding interest in human spirituality, is a kind of walking oxymoron: an honored pariah among his own people. “I think I’m tolerated,” he told me later. The takeaway from Tart’s performance was, for me, simply how broadly and how dramatically the public has been lied to. The paranormal is heaped into one great manure pile. But the parapsychologists I met in Seattle not only can’t be equated with the philosophers of the New Age, they seem deeply suspicious of anyone who brings up questions of spirituality at all.
I think this might be because parapsychologists are discussing a very small tear in the accepted model of the fabric of reality—one that could possibly admit all manner of New Age hoo ha, but then again might not. Theoretically, if psi exists, we cannot possibly know how much its existence will change our view of the world until we understand the mechanism by which it works. In other words, psi might not be so extraordinary a claim after all.
Want some evidence for that?
Well, for one thing, from a practical perspective, psi has little impact. What parapsychologists have found is that evidence of psi is only elicited over a vast number of trials, and even then it’s best seen statistically. Run the Ganzfeld or a remote viewing test over hundreds of trials and the hit rate finally reaches what is known as “statistical significance,” when chance seems a far less likely explanation than psi. In simpler terms, that might mean a 32 percent hit rate, when guessing would yield the correct answer 25 percent of the time. Over enough trials, even a 2 or 3 percent margin reaches statistical significance. And viewed in purely statistical terms, the evidence for psi is robust. One of the most compelling studies I’ve seen demonstrated that once enough trials are conducted, the presence of some form of mental telepathy pops out more convincingly than the evidence supporting the use of aspirin for heart attack. But that doesn’t mean we can all stroll out to the nearest street corner psychic or big-ticket professional like Allison DuBois. In fact, it means just the opposite. Psychic functioning is too unreliable to be commodified or counted upon—if it exists, it really is the ghost in the machine, the phenomenon that only makes itself known at the margins.
And so this begs a question: if psychic functioning is real, but seemingly not a practical factor in our day-to-day lives, is that really such an extraordinary claim? Isn’t psi rejected so hotly mostly because of its long-running connection to mysticism, its considerable buildup of Paranormal Taint? I asked the skeptic, French, the same question—with a bit more humor. “Look,” I asked, “if the research indicates some small psi effect today, and rockets take off according to the laws of Newtonian physics today, if we simply admit this telepathy research into the canon—won’t a rocket still take off tomorrow?”
French immediately chuckled. “Yes, yes,” he said.
“Then how radical an idea is it, really?” I continued. “I mean, we won’t necessarily have to rewrite the laws of physics, but more likely amend them. Isn’t this usual skeptical argument, that acknowledging telepathy will force us to rewrite the laws of physics, simply a kind of reverse superstition? A kind of hysteria?”
“Yes, well,” he said, chuckling louder still. “I think you might be on to something there.”
IN MY OWN CURIOSITY on this topic, I have consulted a few psychics over the years. And two experiences stand out.
In the first one, I see a sign for a fortuneteller on a street in midtown New York. This isn’t, of course, the kind of high-end psychic we see on TV who charges hundreds of dollars an hour for a private consultation. But it is the kind of psychic we personally encounter most frequently, and I want to see what she is all about. So I walk inside, happy in summer to have found an air-conditioned room. The supposed psychic points me to a seat and sits down herself. She is young, so young in fact that I wonder how she is supposed to pick up deep, hidden information about my life when she probably at this stage knows so very little about her own. But no matter, this roughly eighteen-year-old girl of indeterminate Middle Eastern origin, asks for and receives ten of my dollars. Now she stares deeply into my eyes.
“What is your name?” she asks.
I had hoped she might predict it, so we’re off to a bit of a rocky start. “Steven,” I tell her.
“Steven,” she says. “Steven, Steven, Steven!”
She closes her eyes and reaches for my hand across the small table between us, expertly avoiding the crystal ball.
“Steven, give me your left hand, Steven!” she says.
I give her my left hand and she clutches it in both of hers, opening her eyes again and staring at me intently. “Steven,” she says, manipulating the fingers of my ringless left hand between her palms and closing her eyes again.
“You are not married!” she says.
She exclaims this as if this is psychic information, though she no doubt gained it from the sense of … touch. She opens her eyes again.
“Would you like to be?” she asks.
“Sure,” I say.
Her eyes snap shut again. “Steven! Steven! I see love coming for you!” she says. “But Steven our time is up. For ten dollars more, I can tell you about this love I see.”
This is a classic scam. Executed quickly and inartfully. And if I had proven particularly gullible, this short grifting exercise might even have turned into a long con. Disreputable psychics will tell the most vulnerable clients they are under some sort of curse—then offer to remove it for a fee.
For me, however, the experience that pushed me away from psychics was more personal than this—and it came in the past year.
Doreen Molloy is very different than the street corner psychic I saw in New York. Molloy has been vetted in double-and triple-blind readings by the Windbridge Institute, a research group that has focused on mediumship. In these trials, Molloy proved remarkably successful and attained the enigmatic status of a Windbridge certified “Level Five Medium.” I found this a bit funny, but it also intrigued me. The idea of a so-called expert medium underscored the difference between the science of parapsychology conducted by someone like Dean Radin and the performance of a psychic, who purports to be the one delivering accurate information as a professional. The imperatives are entirely differ
ent. Someone like Radin, testing psychic ability in the general population, can afford to be happy about a small but statistically significant result. Someone like Molloy needs to deliver, well, a bit of razzle-dazzle to keep customers coming back.
I took a few minutes before the call to write down the names of five people I’ve lost, including my oldest brother, my brother-in-law, my mother, and two friends who had died, far too young, in the previous year. I scanned over their names, feeling silly about it, but still hoping Molloy might be real, the afterlife might exist, and one or more of them might come through.
The first half-hour was entirely unremarkable, not really any different than any other reading I’ve had. She supplied such a wide variety of information that I could have applied it, or not applied it, to any number of people. This was remarkably frustrating, especially because early on she mentioned that an older woman, who died of cancer, had stepped forward. This woman was so weak at the end that dying was a relief.
Surely, this could have been my mother. The problem is that it also could have been millions of other mothers—and to make matters worse, Molloy had nothing with which to follow it up, nothing that was specific only to my mother. When I asked her for something I could use as confirmation, she asked if my mother was a musician or had a career in music.
