Paranormalia

A Crowdfunding Appeal

Crowdfunding is a big deal these days, to judge from the number of start-ups using it to fund innovative new devices. It seems to work and I've been wondering if and when psi research would start using it.

Now someone has. The Windbridge Institute is appealing for help to fund an investigation of the healing effects on the bereaved of readings by mediums.

Director Julie Beischel comments:

For those of you who have already experienced the healing effects of a mediumship reading, putting effort into studying this may seem like a waste of time. I assure you that it is not. In our culture, science serves as an authority and only by using the tools of science can we truly affect change and potentially make this a treatment option available to everyone suffering from a loss.

Any scientific research on mediums is worth doing, so I hope this bears fruit. Michael Prescott has published Julie's email in full, and you can sign up here.

The Windbridge Research on Mediums

Still on the subject of mediums, I heard recently from Dr. Julie Beischel at the Windbridge Institute. She has a new e-book out describing her ten years of research: Among Mediums: A Scientist's Quest for Answers. She has published journal articles (eg here), but this is more for a lay audience,

people who are interested in what science has to say about modern mediums ... who have seen what television producers imagine appeals to the public and who now want the real story.

It's a little gem - short and succinct, highly readable, and packed with interesting insights. It's also very accessible - £3 for Kindle owners ($4.99 in the US).

Beischel studied at the University of Arizona where she gained a PhD in pharmacology and toxology. There she joined the VERITAS program of mediumistic research. When the funding for her position dried up she started her own venture, the Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential. She says she has only ever sought one reading with a medium for herself, which she describes in some detail. Her mother had killed herself during this period, and she rated the statements relating to her as 93% successful.

As a result of her research Beischel 'definitively' concluded that certain mediums are able to report 'accurate and specific information about discarnates without using any normal means to acquire that information'. She doesn't give much detail about this, but is good on the issues involved: that is, the need for fully blinded conditions, optimal environments and maximum controls. She also stresses the need for skilled participants. Windbridge has around twenty mediums who have all been put through an extensive screening, training and certification procedure. They are part of the research team, and donate four hours per month or more.

They assist in protocol development, participate in research readings, and perform demonstrations during public events. They are willing - for the good of science - to attempt experimental protocols that go well beyond their comfort zones and, in an upcoming hematological and psychophysiological study, some of them are even willing to let me poke them with needles to draw their blood. Therefore, we want them to be kind, honest, trustworthy, compassionate, humble, and respectful: the kind of people we want to be around (a characteristic that many mediums I have met do not share). Mediums who do not follow the ethics guidelines are (and have been) removed from the program.

No money changes hands at any point. Ninety percent of the team are women, which Beischel thinks accurately reflects the general mediumistic population, at least in the US (interesting, as I've always believed it was more around the two thirds mark). It's quite costly to test mediums, apparently: up to $10,000 each. But the sample is big enough, she says, to be confident that it represents American secular mediums as a whole.

Windbridge focuses on three areas: the content and accuracy of the information; the process; and the practical social applications. Psychic research has been big on the first of these, but less on the second, so it was good to see that covered. (I have wondered about what mediums actually experience, how the perceptions seem to them, as mental experiences, but for some reason psychic researchers seldom ask, and mediums themselves rarely bother to describe it.)

It's interesting that there are important differences between what mediums and psychics experience. Beischel reasonably argues that this helps to throw light on the difficult question of where the information is coming from - discarnates, the sitters' minds, or some psychic reservoir of information - which is hard to determine conclusively from the statements themselves (she herself 'leans towards' survival).

In just the mediumship readings, the [mediums] reported the presence of signs that contact had been made. These signs included sounds like rings or whines, light flashes, or feelings of vibrations or heat. They also reported the mediumship experience as involving independent autonomous communicators who could surprise and even frighten the medium with their presence and who had opinions with which the mediums didn't always agree. Another difference between the mediumship and psychic reading descriptions was that while the mediums actually experienced the emotions of the discarnates during mediumship readings, they were merely aware of the emotions of the living clients during psychic readings.

The emphasis on physiological changes is important; Beischel notes, as it 'may help show that mediumistic communication is a normal human process...' Such data has been gathered, and there are plans to include fMRI scanning data, if funding permits - details to be published later. As regards psychological profile, 83% of the mediums were categorized by Myers-Briggs indicators as being strong on intuition and feeling, a potentially significant finding as this is true of only 16% of the US population. The category with the lowest representation of these qualities are police and detectives, who score only 4% on these two personality features - perhaps one reason why the relationship between the two groups can be tense, Beischel suggests.

As regards applications of the research, Windbridge doesn't have the resources to investigate the value of 'forensic' mediumship - the help mediums can give in police investigations of murder, missing persons and suchlike - although the book includes some links. But Beischel has quite a lot to say about its potential therapeutic value in treating grief caused by bereavement. She points to a meta-analysis of studies of conventional grief counselling, which concludes that it provides little benefit. This contrasts with studies that show that after-death experiences, whether spontaneous or induced can dramatically reduce grief. Examples are Allan L Botkin's work with traumatised war veterans; also Raymond Moody's mirror gazing procedure.

Beischel would like to see credentialed mediums working together with licensed mental health professionals to help the bereaved cope with grief. She has designed a clinical trial to analyse the effects and see whether reading accuracy correlates at all with changes in levels of grief. (She is having trouble funding it, however, so if anyone is interested in getting involved in a planned crowd-funding initiative, join the email list at www.windbridge.org).

Beischel also thinks that there's a role for mediums in the context of hospices and palliative care, helping to make the prospect of transition easier to deal with.

I am regularly saddened by the fact that we in Western cultures spend so much time, energy, and resources to train pregnant women on what to expect and how to best deliver yet we don't give the dying even a hint of what to expect or how to prepare. Perhaps mediumship readings may be part of a new training system for the dying.

There are many questions still to research, such as whether mediumship is something that can be taught, and if so, who are the best candidates and what is the best method. Is there a genetic component? Who can mediums communicate with? Can they provide medical information? How does mediumship differ across cultures? What are the social implications of belief in an afterlife?

It's encouraging that this research is going on, and did not simply disappear with the closure of the VERITAS programme in 2008. Considering how much attention it got, I'm curious that Beischel skates rather quickly over her involvement with it, and avoids even mentioning Gary Schwartz by name. Perhaps she didn't want to get sidetracked into discussing what became a rather controversial episode. Still, I'd be interested to hear her views about that work.

I'm glad, too, to see that someone is starting to think beyond the business of proving mediumship to be genuine, towards what this new knowledge might mean for society in the long term. My view is that the difficulties here are underestimated. It's easy to see how mediums might help in the way Beischel describes, but not hard either to imagine the controversies that this sort of activity might create in the medical and healthcare community - of the kind that has long existed in the realm of police investigation.

If two-way communication ever becomes scientifically validated, then mediums will come to hold some kind of authority that they do not now possess. In that case, potentially the recently-deceased become active agents in human affairs, and not necessarily always in a good way. Just to take one example, Beischel throws out the possibility of discarnates one day being able to finger crime suspects - but do we imagine they will always tell the truth? The miasma of suspicion such a thing could create hardly bears thinking about.

But perhaps this is unduly pessimistic. There's certainly little prospect of it happening in the near future. In the meantime, there's no reason why we should not start seeing local initiatives in which mediums co-operate with healthcare professionals who are convinced by what they do in order to help alleviate human suffering. If that happens, it will be largely thanks to pioneering scientific investigations like Windbridge, and the example it gives for other researchers to follow.

Michael Tymn on Leonora Piper

I've been working on an e-book transcript of Leonora Piper sittings, with a view to making this material more accessible (although it's probably still a few months away). It's been on my mind, as a large body of credible research that tends to make sceptic views of mediumship untenable.

So I was delighted to see Michael Tymn's new book Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife. In principle I'd recommend to open-minded people - those who really do want answers - that they check out the Piper material, but if I haven't often done so, that's because there's no obvious source for them to go to. Thanks to Tymn that's no longer the case.

I'm also gratified by what a good job he's done. In other hands the story might well have been told as a conventional biography, covering the whole of psychic research in the context of the thought of the day. In other words, it would have been diluted and hedged about with the sorts of qualifications that tend to make this sort of thing invisible. Tymn's achievement has been to hammer home a shocking and still largely unknown fact: a human being has lived who was repeatedly observed by scientific investigators to possess supernormal knowledge - and far beyond the ability of pseudo-explanations such as cold reading to account for.

To do this, Tymn has compressed a 25-year programme into 200 pages, focusing closely on the research and its implications. He tells the story chronologically, from Piper's 'discovery' (it seems a maid employed by her husband's family mentioned her doings to a maid employed by William James's in-laws); the three main 'control' phases: Phinuit, George Pelham and Imperator/Rector; the conversion of SPR investigator Richard Hodgson (who had begun with the expectation of exposing her tricks); the trip to England to hold sittings with Frederic Myers and Oliver Lodge; the later involvement of James Hyslop; and so on.

Some of the most interesting chapters are around particular episodes, for instance a series of conversations between a 17-year old boy who died in a boating accident in 1898 and his parents; a Boston public figure describing his new environment; Hodgson himself, following his death at age 50, communicating with James and Hyslop; and finally the deceased James himself communicating. The book deftly works in summaries of key passages with enough verbatim speech to give a good sense of the interactions. Wherever possible it highlights evidential exchanges, for instance those that show knowledge of little things known only to the communicator and the sitter, and again which could not remotely be explained in terms of fraud.

The impression left on my mind - as someone who knows a bit about mediumship, and Piper in particular - is amazement at just how easy, fluent and detailed this two-way communication can be, and also how much highly veridical material the investigations produced. There's a powerful sense that people who once lived are excited to find they can, after all, communicate with loved ones left behind, and reassure them of their continued existence, which they do with varying levels of skill - just as we would expect.

Sceptics will dismiss the book as a partisan account by a writer who accepts the reality of spirit survival. Some might argue that the material has been cleaned up, removing the errors and distortions that give a quite different impression, for instance showing the medium groping for information. It's impossible of course to counter these objections completely, although it might help if some sitting transcripts were given as appendices, so that readers can make an independent judgement. The economics clearly don't permit this in a printed book, but it might be possible in a future Kindle edition? Failing this, the transcripts can be made freely available on Kindle and elsewhere- as I am hoping to arrange.

Since I largely share Tymn's conviction about the reality of spirit communication, his presentation seems to me to be true to the material, and his conclusion entirely reasonable. There's no intelligent way that the supernormality of the Piper material can be denied (there are of course many unintelligent ones - like Martin Gardner's transparently false claim that the investigators were ignorant of fakers' methods - but Tymn rightly wastes no time on them). However it is also true that some investigators preferred to view the communicators - particularly the 'controls' like Phinuit and George Pellew who acted as go-betweens - as secondary personalities, or what they called 'dream creations' of the medium's unconscious mind.

A prime mover in this was William James himself, as Tymn records - in a recent post he laments James's fence-sitting as showing mere lack of courage. But James was not alone: the SPR's Eleanor Sidgwick also argued at length that the whole thing was largely a phantasmagoria in Piper's brain - a view that coloured much SPR thinking in the twentieth century and has informed subsequent debate. In Mediumship and Survival, Alan Gauld states that he does not see 'how it is possible to dissent from Mrs Sidgwick's conclusion that the Piper controls were one and all aspects of Mrs Piper's own personality'. Phinuit, he states firmly, was 'quite certainly fictitious'.

The 'Imperator' band of controls were never able to establish their identity, but hazarded all kinds of incorrect and contradictory guesses as their own 'real' names. Even the most life-like and realistic controls, such as GP, show signs of being impersonations . . . they break down at just the point where Mrs Piper's own stock of knowledge runs out. Viz. when they are required to talk coherently of science, philosophy and literature (which the living GP could readily have done).

In view of the quantity and quality of veridical statements Sidgwick couldn't reject the idea of spirit communication completely. So she talked instead of a sort of spurious drama being enacted by secondary personalities, that in some sense might sometimes be directed or 'overshadowed' by genuine spirits at a distance. Gauld's subsequent elaboration of this idea influenced my own thinking for a long time, even while I struggled to make sense of it.

I wonder now whether the idea of 'overshadowing' was ever coherent. It certainly never caught on. My impression now - from having recently read transcripts of hundreds of sittings, and reinforced by Tymn's book - is very much to the contrary. The sense is overwhelmingly of a channel of communication having opened up, and being taken full advantage of by real people, despite its imperfections. Yes there is some dud stuff - names given that were wrong; facts alluded to that didn't check out; and so on. Some sittings were a complete write-off. But much of this, as Tymn stresses, is accounted for by the very real difficulties involved, and which some of the communicators - particularly the deceased Hodgson and James - talk about at length.

I've come to I believe that fence-sitting by commentators like Sidgwick, James and Gauld should be seen less as an effect of ambiguities in the material than of the huge difficulty experienced by the twentieth century intellectual of stepping outside the secular-scientific consensus that there is no such thing as spirit survival. It's an inner struggle of which they may only be partly conscious. Their solution? Let it all be a subconscious dramatic production - something the secular mind can relate to - while the real dead, if they exist, remain remote and unknowable, pulling the strings from some way off.

This seems an odd phenomenon, to those of us who don't experience it. But it's surely something we should expect. We see it dramatically in the behaviour of militant sceptics - emotional, angry, desperately uninformed - but also in psychic researchers themselves. These rationalising manoeuvres represent themselves as objective analysis, and influence generations. The conclusion is that science will never get a grip on this slippery subject until it understands how it can affect the very minds that contemplate it.

Baggini's Heathenism

In Randi's Prize I held a brief imaginary dialogue with Julian Baggini, a philosopher who writes for the Guardian. I picked Baggini because he'd made some remarks about mediums, but also because he sounded like the sort of atheist that a person with religious interests could have a conversation with. That impression has been confirmed by the thoughtful articles about religious belief that he has been writing on the Guardian's Comment-is-Free site recently - not least by the infuriated responses of hardline atheists.

Today in the print version Baggini publishes a manifesto, a list of 12 points that distinguishes what a 'heathen' believes. I like the term 'heathen', but use it in a jokey sense, along with 'infidel'. Baggini has a serious use for it: he thinks it helps distinguish moderate atheism from the highly-charged version espoused by 'bishop-bashers' like Dawkins and Hitchens. It shows that 'we do not think too highly or ourselves', unlike terms such as 'rationalist' and 'bright' - which imply (I guess he would agree) that people who think differently are irrational and stupid.

So what's in the manifesto? Baggini starts with beliefs. Like all atheists, heathens are naturalists, who have no reason to believe there is anything like heavens, spirit worlds and deities. They arrive at this conclusion because their first commitment is to the truth,

a commitment to see the world as truthfully as we can, using our rational faculties as best we can, based on the best evidence we have. That is where our primary commitment lies, and we are prepared to accept the possibility that we are wrong about some of the specific beliefs that has led us to.

However heathens are emphatically not followers of scientism. For them, science is not the last word on everything. They can even be made to feel uncomfortable by the way it undermines certain beliefs about free will and rationality. They also recognise that human beings are very imperfect users of reason, easily led astray by biases, distortions and prejudices.

Reason itself always leaves us short of certain knowledge, requiring us to rely on our judgements in order to come a conclusion.

That isn't to say that heathens aren't confident that they're right, they just prefer to be discreet about their certainty. They'll concede that religion may help people to be happier and healthier, if the evidence is there, although it wouldn't make them give up their convictions. They are secularists, but don't demand that religion be banished from society or public life.

Some heathens can even be a tiny bit religious themselves:

A small minority of religions reject the real existence of supernatural entities and divinely authored texts, accept that science trumps dogma, and see the essential core of religion in its values and practices. These are entirely compatible with the heathen position.

In fact religion is often the heathen's friend:

We believe in not being tone-deaf to religion and to understand it in the most charitable way possible. So we support religions when they work to promote values we share, including those of social justice and compassion. We are respectful and sympathetic to the religious when they arrive at their different conclusions on the basis of the same commitment to sincere, rational, undogmatic inquiry as us, without in any way denying that we believe them to be false and misguided.

On the other hand that's balanced by an 'equally honest' commitment to be critical of religion when necessary, especially when it 'promotes prejudice, division or discrimination, suppresses truth or stands in the way of medical or social progress.'

There were some approving comments, although it seems a lot of atheists are attached to their dogmatic warrior status, and would hate to lose it. The idea of giving ground to religions is intolerable to them (eg 'I like Atheist, it's loud, proud and to the point. Heathen sounds like I'm a pussy.') But Baggini predicts that many people of faith will agree with much of what he says, and I think he's right. He's to be commended for making the effort to build bridges and deflate the rhetoric.

Obviously, though, I disagree that scientific naturalism is the inevitable outcome of a 'commitment to the truth'.

Elsewhere, as I mentioned in Randi's Prize, Baggini argues that belief in life after death can only be based on faith, since the evidence and good reasons required for a rational argument that it exists are lacking. True, mediums sometimes make correct statements, but then there are bound to be occasional uncanny coincidences and lucky guesses. If there were genuine communication between the living and the dead, there would surely be many more accurate and otherwise inexplicable communications. The fact that they are so rare suggests they are genuine, but frauds, guesses and coincidences.

I went on to point out that Baggini could not reasonably talk this way if he knew anything about psychic research.

Just now I'm going through the investigative material on Leonora Piper, and it's an extraordinary read. Much of it consists of notes taken of sittings, where one can see the back-and-forth between sitter and Piper, in the form of a distinct trance personality. A sitter will typically hear his or her extended family described in detail, with exact names, ages, characteristics, interests, living or dead and so on, without any feedback or anything that gives the slightest support for the cold reading hypothesis. The communications were not only accurate and inexplicable, they were very far from being rare. On the contrary, this material is voluminous and no serious challenge has ever been mounted against it: such efforts as there have been are trivial. Even well-informed sceptics agreed that telepathy was the minimum needed to explain it.

Those of us who know about this, and about many other similar investigations of other individuals, think of it as evidence. In my case, the findings of psychic research help inform my spiritualistic worldview. That worldview may be in conflict with Baggini's naturalism, yet it's surely consistent with the commitment, as he describes it, to 'see the world as truthfully as we can, using our rational faculties as best we can, based on the best evidence we have'.

I'd add that it doesn't appear especially truthful or rational to insist that all mediums rely on pre-gathered information or cold-reading, when there are instances - and Piper is far from being the only one - that powerfully refute that.

Baggini's excuse is ignorance. As I said in my book, I guess he doesn't know that psychic research even exists. It's not on his radar; the people he mixes with, the institutions he frequents will know nothing about it either. It's part of the naturalist creed - and in this respect a creed is exactly what it is - that all such notions have been swept away by modern science.

If, on the other hand, he knows all about Piper but has a reasoned counter-argument, then I would be interested to hear it. I suspect it would be based largely on the fact of no one having won James Randi's million dollars, the possibility of cold-reading, the gullibility of investigators - all those general nostrums that sceptics typically offer, and that reveal minds that have not yet got to grips with the problem.

I think this evocation of the primacy of reason is made with the sceptic's natural complacency. A true commitment to truth and reason could eventually lead a thinker to interesting places - and expose him to deeply awkward conclusions.

A Medical Medium

As I've mentioned, I'm fascinated by what psychics and mediums do. I've long been convinced by the academic research that it's a real process. But how does it start? What exactly do they experience?

Not being psychic at all, to me mediums seem like a different species. Many of them say they've always had the gift, that as children they saw dead people, and assumed everyone did, and so on. They're so much part of the whole psychic spiritualism thing, with its jargon of 'energy' and 'vibrations', that it takes an effort of will to enter into their world. Some small part of me still thinks it's all made up.

But what if someone who is very much part of the real world - if there is such a thing - were to cross over? Doctors, for instance. I've always considered them to be a highly sceptical bunch, having been trained in the rationalist, problem-solving scientific tradition.

Years ago I recall visiting my local GP about a minor complaint carrying with me a book about psi research. He commented on this, having just read somewhere that ESP had been definitively debunked. (I believe it was an article by Susan Blackmore, who was pretty much everywhere at the time.) He wasn't hostile, but I got the sense that it would be pointless trying to convince him otherwise.

So I was glad when I was recently given an excellent book about a London GP who works as a spirit medium. It's called Consulting Spirit: A Doctor's Experience with Practical Mediumship, by Ian D. Rubenstein. (I thought at first he must be an American, since the book uses American terms like 'primary care physician' but it turns out this is only because the book is published in the US.)

Rubenstein's experience started in his surgery one day when a patient having his blood pressure checked suddenly said he had a man with him, and he wanted to have a word. The doctor had previously had no idea that this patient, a public relations whizz in the entertainment world, had anything to do with spirits. But went along with it, and to his complete astonishment the man then channelled his grandfather with a 20-minute discussion about Rubenstein's personal life.

Rubenstein subsequently learned this was something that he should be doing too, and started having powerful and accurate intuitions. He talks about receiving what feels like a 'tug' or even a 'slap' on the back of the head. This happened once when he chucked his car keys on the table just as he was going out, knowing he wouldn't need them; he felt a slap and a verbal warning to take them or they would get stolen. He ignored it, the keys were stolen, and all kinds of problems ensued.

In one particularly striking incident he hears from an acquaintance at the gym that her grand daughter has swallowed the plastic cap from a pen. It's assumed to be in her digestive system, but Rubenstein has the strong impression that it has lodged in one of her bronchial tubes, which would be much more serious. He convinces the woman and her daughter to have the child tested, but x-rays show nothing wrong. Having spooked them completely they insist on further tests in a major hospital. Still nothing seems amiss.

Finally, to calm the frantic women, a doctor suggests pushing a bronchoscope tube down the girl's windpipe.

That afternoon, the doctor looking after Kirsty extracted the chewed cap of a red plastic ballpoint pen from her right main bronchus. Because she'd chewed it, the plastic cap had frayed into little barbs so that it had begun to embed itself into the wall of the bronchus. It was unlikely she would have been able to cough it up. The consequences of it being left in her lung for any length of time would have been disastrous for Kirsty's health. She would have developed pneumonia or possibly even a serious chronic lung condition called bronchiectasis.

A useful come-back to the 'what good does it do?' complaint that sceptics always make about psychics, methinks.

Encouraged to go into it more deeply, Rubenstein joined a training circle at a spiritualist church. His first experience at the circle involved sitting in a circle and trying to focus on the first image that came into his head - as he says, the complete opposite of what they teach you at medical school. But he quickly discovered that the images were meaningful to other people. The figures he saw, and the situations they described, were understood and accepted by them, with a level of detail that makes any kind of chance or Barnum effect implausible.

Here's an example:

In my mind's eye, I could still clearly see Jane, standing behind Hayley. But behind her I became aware of an altogether more shadowy presence. This was a woman, older than Jane, with gray hair and wearing a floral dress. She was smiling and had her hands on Jane's shoulders. Then the image changed and became more vivid. I experienced the startlingly clear vision of a crystal chandelier, which took up my entire inner field of view. It radiated a powerful light and I could clearly see rainbow colors refracted from the cut crystal.

With that, I felt I'd suddenly been handed a vast amount of information about this woman; as if she'd somehow dropped it into my head, all at once.

I heard myself saying, very quickly, "I can see a crystal chandelier. There wasn't just one - she had lots of them. Her house was full of crystal chandeliers. She was very proud of her house. It was always neat. She was very close to you. I think she was your grandmother or maybe your grandmother's sister. She had a stroke and was incapacitated towards the end of her life... Then I started to splutter... I felt an intense happiness welling up in my chest. It became impossible to contain it and I burst into tears. Everyone in the room was looking at me. I couldn't help it. I was overcome with emotion. Then I lost the connection. It just went. I could remember what I'd seen but the vividness of the information was not longer so apparent. The emotions I'd been feeling had suddenly disappeared, as if someone had thrown a switch. However, the image of the crystal chandelier remained very clear - I can still recall it.

Hayley was looking at me intensely. "That was my aunt. My great aunt. You got her exactly right. And she loved crystal chandeliers. But the best bit is the fact that you're crying." "Why?" I asked. I felt extremely foolish. I hadn't cried in public since I was a child. "Because nine years or so before she died she'd had a stroke, like you said. It affected her brain. She became much more emotional. She used to cry whenever she was happy." I was pleased but I felt as if I'd been put through the wringer. My headache was back and I was completely drained of energy.

I found these sorts of detailed descriptions of the inner process quite useful. I also resonated with the way the author dealt with his new experiences. The tone is well judged: he is properly sceptical, in the sense of examining and questioning them, but he doesn't let this get in the way of his curiosity. He doesn't panic or try to suppress his intuitions. Nor does he agonise about what people might think when he develops his mediumship. He just gets on with it. In fact it surprised me how enthusiastically he embraced his new calling, while continuing his professional work. (It helps that he has a supportive wife, and nobody at his work appeared to seriously stand in his way.)

The book is breezy like a novel, written largely in dialogue, which makes it an easy and entertaining read. As I say, it's informative about the process of becoming a medium, and I really recommend it.

But more than that, it's also an important book. Rubenstein has shown how it is possible for an ordinary non-psychic member of society, someone who in his professional work is embedded in rationalist thinking, not merely to adjust to psychic intuition when it arrives unbidden, but to learn how to use it for the benefit of others.

(Since posting this, Ian Rubenstein has been in touch, and is happy to answer any questions readers may have in the comments thread below.)

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Plans for the Million Dollar Challenge?

I've been listening to a conversation between organisers of James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge. They were discussing a test of psychics that they organised for ABC's Primetime Nightline show last summer. It was quite revealing.

The test was set up by the stage magician Banacheck, DJ Grothe (president of the James Randi Educational Foundation), and Jamy Ian Swiss, also a magician and one of JREF'S resident experts on psychics. The clip can't be viewed outside the US, so I can't comment on how it went. But I was struck by the comments of Grothe and Swiss afterwards.

They categorise psychics in three ways. First there are the celebrities, led by the 'Unholy Trinity' of John Edward, James van Praagh and Sylvia Browne. Such people do great harm and make big bucks scamming ordinary people, they complain. They're desperate for scientific endorsement - if they get one they'll never stop talking about it - yet at the same time they're 'desperately afraid' to submit themselves to proper scientific testing. That's why none of them ever pitches for the million dollars.

Then there are the 'store-front' psychics, who offer quick readings off the street for a token fee, then try to bilk their customers with expensive cures for invented ills. The JREF folks were dismayed to learn that Nightline was targeting these people as potential participants, as of course none would submit to testing - and none did.

However they got a number of takers from their third category. These are psychics in the spirituality and New Age community, some of whom accidentally found out about the show and were keen to take part. Swiss calls them 'shut-eyes', by which he means people who actually believe that their psychic powers are real.

Grothe was fascinated by this. The idea of a faker who doesn't realise he/she is faking seemed to be a new idea for him. The psychics he met in the studio were all warm, sincere and kind-hearted, he commented with surprise. It's true, there really are such people, Swiss explained; they just don't realise that what they do is illusory.

Swiss went on to comment that sceptics are far too quick to assume they know what is going on in other people's minds. I'd say that hardly states the case. If they weren't so stuck in their ideological bubble these guys would know that psychic vision isn't just a game played by con artists - it's a mental process that people experience - more often than one would think. Just now I'm reading a book by a doctor who suddenly began having accurate psychic intuitions about real-life situations, followed it up, and is now also a practising amateur medium (a fascinating story for another post). You can't associate with psychics and mediums for long without understanding this. It doesn't have to be taken at face value, but that's where genuine investigation starts, by getting up close.

Grothe and Swiss also talked about the Challenge itself. This time, instead of designing a bespoke test, JREF came up with an off-the-shelf version they could apply more or less to any psychic, whether palm or tarot reader, psychometrist, mediums, or even astrologer. This was the way they'd like to go in future, Swiss said. It would mean the challenge would be more accessible, and they could take it out to the psychic community. 'No preliminaries, a one-shot test, and if you pass we'll give you a million bucks.'

As things stand, the Challenge is not a scientific test, as Swiss himself explicitly said. If someone ever won, he pointed out, it wouldn't mean that person was psychic, it would just mean he/she won on that day. It would be a fluke. (Surely this makes a nonsense of the taunt that psychics, by refusing the Challenge, show how scared they are of scientific testing.)

But there seems to be a certain impulse for change at JREF. When the Challenge was saved, having earlier been slated for retirement by Randi, I recall talk of it being made more transparent and accessible. This is odd, in a way. One of its strengths as a propaganda device has been that it's so opaque. We're invited to take the Great Man's word for it that no one has passed the preliminaries. With rare exceptions that's all there is.

It also succeeds by being so extremely hostile to the idea of what it aims to test. That ensures that no one who is at all gifted will participate, reduces the likelihood that anyone will win, and reinforces expectations of what it will find. As a method of investigation it's a non-starter.

So why tinker with it? It works perfectly well by just sitting there like a big roadblock. Scientists and sceptics love it, as it saves them having to leave their comfort zone.

But if younger, more dynamic people come along, and start doing things with the Challenge, pushing out the boundaries, what then? What might it become? As far as I'm aware there have only been three televised tests, but perhaps we could start seeing more of those. Suppose more psychics and mediums are encouraged to take part. In theory that might raise the chances of someone winning the cash, in which case the Challenge would become the victim of its organisers' overconfidence.

What interests me more is the possibility that, along the way, some of them might start to get a more educated view of psychics, and perhaps even feel that there's something here worth checking out, instead of mindlessly debunking.

I could be wrong, but I thought I glimpsed in this conversation some faint stirrings of seriousness. It would be going too far to call it scientific curiosity, but it might be the precursor to it.

Susan Goes to a Séance

Went to Goldsmiths in South London yesterday to hear Susan Blackmore give an entertaining talk about her visit to a séance. She explained that her notoriety as a sceptic makes her a target for people trying to change her mind, and had half promised she would go to one if an opportunity arose. Someone took her up on that and she decided to give it a go.

(She didn't identify the circle, having been asked by the organiser not to. But she mentioned it posts audio files online, and I found it here. )

It's a materialisation circle which meets regularly, in a large garden shed. Blackmore was invited to arrive early and check the place out for anything suspicious. She found the usual set-up with a 'cabinet' consisting of an enclosed space for the medium to sit in covered by a curtain, and couldn't see anything obviously amiss, although wasn't sure what to look for. There were about ten sitters, who mostly seemed to know each other. The medium, when he arrived, turned out to be a big burly chap. When the sitting started he was tied to the chair "with the most incompetent tying I have ever seen" - a bit of rope and a granny knot, although cable ties were also used that looked more impressive. She didn't know what method was used to escape from cable ties, but assumed there must be one.

Blackmore had certain expectations of what a séance would be like - a lot of holding of hands and hymn-singing to "build up the power". It turned out there was little of that - only a rather perfunctory prayer at the beginning, and then an Abba CD playing for the duration. There was total darkness, so she couldn't see anything. I think she had intended to play a section of audio from the website, but the equipment wasn't working, so to give us an idea of what she heard she asked us to close our eyes (to simulate darkness), then rattled two chairs together quite violently for a bit. She then produced an extraordinary choking roar, which settled down into a rough rasping whisper - the voice of the materialised spirit.

There was a lot of excited chatter, with talk of the 'power' being 'really strong this evening'. A number of 'spirits' were said to have materialised, including one named Yellow Feather, talking in different voices that all, as far as she could see, came from the medium himself. At one point there was a big to-do when they announced they would dematerialise him: he duly appeared to vanish from the chair - according to sitters who were invited to touch it - and his voice came from the ceiling. Everyone seemed very impressed, and afterwards they adjourned for tea and cakes.

My own expectation was that Blackmore would treat the whole business with laughing incredulity, which of course she did. She provided the standard sceptic - and in my view, entirely inadequate - preamble about the history of Victorian spiritualism to set the tone, and wondered - perhaps with more justice - why nothing seems to have changed in a century and a half. The séance always involves the same props: the trumpet for direct voice, the obligatory native American, and so on.

But she did seem genuinely baffled by it all. Why on earth would people behave like this? She was sure no one was benefiting materially, as there was no charge for attendance. Talking with the other guests afterwards she heard that people came because they wanted something 'spiritual' in their lives. But this didn't make sense, because there was nothing remotely spiritual about anything that happened. Perhaps it was the mere sense of being visited by 'spirits' that gave them the sense of this. Or perhaps they just did it to get out of the house and have fun.

I've never been to any kind of séance, let alone one that purports to materialise spirits. I know that psychic researchers who started checking them out in the 1880s found them quite tiresome, and I suppose I would have felt the same. If I'd had to sit in the darkness listening to Abba for two hours, and a succession of voices talking platitudes, without any clear indication that they came from anyone else but the medium, and having to accept all the claims of what was happening on trust - I think I'd have gone a bit mental.

There was some discussion afterwards, and I don't think anyone came up with any halfway plausible explanation. This has always been one of the great puzzles facing investigators of séance phenomena, that it's not just about charlatans fleecing the gullible public, but that groups of people seem willing to meet once or twice a week, over periods of years, to converse with spirits who, according to all sensible notions, cannot possibly exist. Why do they do it? What do they get out of it?

I did not get much sense of how much Blackmore had thought about this. Did she think it was a charade that the sitters voluntarily acted out? In that case, the psychological issues involved would be dramatic. Then how much of it was deception, and how much self-deception? Any serious simulation would presumably require a certain amount of skill to achieve.

I personally think that sceptics give far too much credit to people in these situations for the amount of effort they are prepared to go to in order to carry out their nefarious tricks. I doubt that they are that motivated. It would make more sense if they were just sitting there and letting stuff happen.

So my own, admittedly heretical suggestion would be that this lot have stumbled on something that exists in nature, some odd natural process, whether or not it is what it seems to be, and are just working with it - as many have done before them. I can't accept Blackmore's version of history, that William Crookes was 'taken in', as she puts it, nor do I think Charles Richet was fooled at the Villa Carmen. But I can readily accept that her bafflement at the idea of a silly charade is nothing compared to the confusion most of us would feel at having to take it seriously.

Scandinavian Fires

The new Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research has just turned up. It has an interesting paper by Erlendur Haraldsson on an Icelandic case which is reminiscent of the famous Stockholm fire incident involving Swedenborg, and described by Immanuel Kant.

The Icelandic case first. It concerns Indridi Indridason, a physical medium who began sitting in Reykavik in 1905, producing strong table movements, automatic writing and trance speech. In November of that year a new communicator appeared, unrecognised by anyone present. He spoke Danish and identified himself as 'Mr Jensen', a common Danish name. There was a rest break, and when the sitting resumed, 'Jensen' reappeared. He said that during the interval he had been to Copenhagen (1300 miles distant) and seen a fire that had just started in a factory there. He left but then returned later in the sitting, saying the fire service had succeeded in putting the fire out after an hour.

As Haraldsson has established, there exist press reports of a fire in Copenhagen at this time. The details match up, that it was in a factory, the time it started, and that it was brought under control within an hour. At this time Iceland was not connected telegraphically with anywhere else. Telephones arrived a year later, and telegraphy only in 1918. The island was completely dependent on snail mail by sea.

A rather obvious explanation is coincidence. Fires in big cities are hardly uncommon. In the four weeks during which the fire occurred (two before and two after), four fires were reported in the main newspaper, including the one described in the Icelandic séance. Only that one started in a factory, which was a far less common occurrence than fires in homes. And only that one was a major fire - the others were small and quickly extinguished, and attracted much less notice.

Haraldsson dutifully considers some other possibilities, that the medium had a confederate in Copenhagen who started the fire or that the message was brought by carrier pigeon - neither of which really get off the ground.

I don't think this is particularly strong evidence, simply because it can be dismissed as coincidence. But I do find it interesting for this reason: that if mediumship is a genuine phenomenon, and if, even, it's more than clairvoyance, and disembodied spirits can return to this world and pay us a visit, then this is the sort of thing one would expect to happen. It would be surprising if the visitors couldn't travel around the globe and observe what's going on.

The incident of the Stockholm fire is a case of seeming clairvoyance. It occurred in 1759 and is described in a letter written four years later by Kant to a friend. The Swedish intellectual (seer, polymath, etc) Swedenborg had been travelling from England and had arrived in the port of Gothenburg, some 250 miles from Stockholm.

About six o'clock, Swedenborg went out, and returned to the company quite pale and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm, at the Södermalm, and that it was spreading fast. He was restless and went out often. He said that the house of one of his friends, whom he named, was already in ashes, and that his own was in danger. At eight o'clock, after he had been out again, he joyfully exclaimed, "Thank God! The fire is extinguished three doors from my house!". The news occasioned great commotion throughout the whole city, but particularly among the company in which he was. It was announced to the Governor the same evening. On Sunday morning, Swedenborg was summoned to the Governor, who questioned him concerning the disaster. Swedenborg described the fire precisely, how it had begun, and in what manner it had ceased, and how long it had continued. On the same day the news spread throughout the city, and as the Governor had thought it worthy of attention, the consternation was considerably increased; because many were in trouble on account of their friends and property, which might have been involved in the disaster.

On Monday evening a messenger arrived in Gothenburg who was sent by the Board of Trade at the time of the fire. In the letter brought by him, the fire was described precisely in the manner stated by Swedenborg. On Tuesday morning the royal courier arrived at the Governor's with the sad news of the fire, the loss which it had occasioned, and houses it had damaged or ruined, not in the least different from that which Swedenborg had given at the time when it happened, for the fire was extinguished at eight o'clock.

This is very unlikely to be mere coincidence. The dates and times match, and Swedenborg's alarm is appropriate to the scale of the conflagration, the largest to occur in the city for many years. It started in Södermalm half a mile from Swedenborg's home and was extinguished less than 300 feet from his house.

Kant seems to have considered it good evidence, and having got a friend to check it out, in both cities, says it is "free from all possible doubt". On the other hand, apart from descriptions of the fire in two newspapers there doesn't seem to be much in the way of independent supporting evidence, so that's all there is to go on. Purely anecdotal. But still pretty startling stuff and, again, if psi is a genuine phenomenon it's the sort of thing we'd expect sometimes to happen.

The Joseph Communications

I've been sent two channelling books to review, Revelation: Joseph's Message (2008) and The Joseph Communications: Your Life After Death (2011). I have mixed feelings about channelling literature, but I'll try to give an objective sense of the contents and then give my two pennyworth.

The books come from a new-ish circle based in the north of England, and are transcripts of trance sessions channelled by Michael G. Reccia, via a 'highly-evolved spirit guide' who (obviously) goes under the name Joseph. Revelation is a series of talks on particular subjects: creation, death and karma, health, work, power, etc. Your Life After Death focuses on the experience of life after death. There is a third book which I haven't seen, and a fourth is said to be planned.

The set-up is similar to Jane Roberts's Seth. As 'Joseph', Reccia talks fluently in front of small gatherings - first delivering a discourse on a particular topic, then answering questions. Joseph describes himself as a former denizen of this world, who some time ago chose not to reincarnate, and wants to help us rediscover the truth about reality and the severity of the situation we face. The delivery is clear and articulate, with no funny accents or behaviour, although Reccia as Joseph gesticulates a lot and sometimes bangs the desk to emphasise a point.

My impression is that the ideas accord mainly, but perhaps not completely, with the picture given by theosophy and spiritualism over the past century and a half. His concepts are sometimes quite hard to follow, but that's typical too. An example:

We wish to talk about beginnings today, and about the seed that is within the human soul; for the soul is not the seed, it is a covering, a vehicle for the seed and not the seed itself. The seed is separate and comes into being of its own violition. Yet there is a paradox here, because it does not have that volition until it becomes separate. So we ask you to consider that God wishes separation in order to grow. The volition first comes from God but, at that point, the seed becomes aware of its own purpose. In other words, God at first thinks of separation and, at that point, the separation exists. Again, the paradox is that the separation is a concept of God, and therefore a part of God, so actual separation never - in terms of your understanding - exists.

So each seed is separate and yet contained within the whole that is God, but God allows the seed to experience growth through the illusion of individuality. The seed is then clothed in various radiations that allow it to interact on a physical level with that physical level. These can be compared to 'skins' or fields of various energies that complete the illusion of separateness from God, from the inner to the outer, the skins become more dense, but they are nothing more than shades put around a light and, within those shades - and particularly within the outermost three - the Earthly perceptions and consciousness reside; but these are nothing more than an illusion, a field which is tissue-thin.

Our task in contacting you is to peel back the layers of misconception that separate the seed from its greater whole and, in doing so, to create an increase of the God-power within the fields, so that the growth that is expected of the seed by God in projecting Itself into individuality can take place. We have to warn mankind that this expected growth is not taking place at this time.

A chapter on 'medicine' argues that the idea of illness is a misconception. There is nothing really wrong with us. We are part of God, and because God is perfect it follows that we are perfect too. If a patient gets better after medical treatment it is because he/she has faith in the treatment. The treatment itself does nothing; it is the patient's faith that makes them well.

In another chapter, Joseph reveals that he was a citizen of the ancient civilization of Atlantis, which existed before the 'second coming' of man. (Reccia reports having been given images of 'a beautiful city set against a lilac-coloured sky and surrounded by peaceful waters in which sailed majestic vessels, intricately carved and decorated.)

Joseph describes Atlantis having a different technology, using 'particle physics' to move objects, able to move and rearrange buildings with the power of mind, heal without touching, and so on. However at some point there was some kind of cataclysm, when it all went to people's heads and changed them.

There was a lot of pain, there was a lot of death, which was caused by these people suddenly creating dark things, dark thoughts that previously didn't exist on the Earth. It changed the nature of how animals looked at each other, and the vibrations were absorbed by the flora and fauna. The earth became a more aggressive place...

I tell you the Earth that I knew is vastly different from the Earth that you know - just a pale shadow of how it used to look. Mistaken thought has done all that, has caused the havoc, the chaos... It is arrogance to suppose that your people are the first people; that your civilisation is the first civilisation. It is not.

This was the Fall, and is the origin of human problems - an idea that Joseph returns to often. Another concept is a sort of mental force field around the Earth made up of humans' thoughts and passions, and which as a result is mainly negative. This 'Field' distorts our thinking, and we let it attract us back into life again and again.

These themes are developed in Your Life After Death, although the focus is less abstract and more personal. Here are a few extracts:

Very quickly in the lower spiritual realms you learn that you have to guard and 'treat' your thoughts - not to hide or mask them but to work on them because your thoughts are instantly displayed in the colour-shield that you have around you. You cannot approach a person in one way and think towards them in another. There is no subterfuge - you do wear your colours 'on your sleeve' and those around you recognise what you are thinking, what you have thought and what you have done because of those colours...

When you view someone in front of you on Earth - your 'friend', your 'enemy', your 'relative', your 'loved one' - you are only seeing one aspect of them. The soul of that person has gone through many incarnations, many experiences, and you do not really know who you are addressing. With the people around you, were you to see who you were really addressing you would be shocked, humbled and amazed and you would change your attitude towards many people. You would approach each person and say, 'I do not know who this person is; I cannot judge them; I cannot be angry with them; I cannot feel superior to them because I do not know who they really are and what they have achieved to this point in their lives.' Appearances are deceptive - please remember that and it will help with your transformation of the physical world...

Souls find themselves in landscapes that are very familiar to them and yet are brighter, clearer and more polished. The skies are bluer; the clouds are whiter; the architecture more perfect; there is a symmetry to the trees (and by symmetry I do not mean they are equally balanced one ach side - I mean that the God within them is more apparent, so more symmetry, perfection and harmony is perceived within their form) and there is nothing that jars about the landscape.

You see great landscapes that on Earth would perhaps frighten you or be too awesome to contemplate. There are towering cliffs, waterfalls, basins of cascading water and vast plains. There are mountains that, to you on Earth, would seem too immense to take in, with dimensions too great to understand. You see spirits who have come from Earth living in places that would terrify you on Earth - living at the edge of waterfalls, living on the edge of chasms, living high in mountains without fear (because there is nothing to fear) ... taking in the majesty of the landscape rather than concentrating on fear of harm to the human frame, which no longer applies...

You are able (using the modern idiom) to 'multi-task' quite easily in the spiritual realms, but you multi-task with your full participation in different aspects of your experience. You can have as many or as few experiences at the same time as you wish, and you can be as involved or as uninvolved in those experiences as you wish. In other words you can be casually involved in a conversation but also be aware that you are undertaking great spiritual tasks at the same time whilst also being aware that, on another level of your consciousness, you are absorbing knowledge whilst you attend a lecture or speak to highly evolved spirits about the evolution of your soul ... and all these things are happening with your conscious participation at the same time.

Many people arrive in the spiritual worlds (as we have said in earlier chapters) and do not wish to change; they wish to get back to the Field and they wish to remain as they always have been - and for them progress is relatively slow. There are other souls who have investigated spiritual possibilities within and outside of themselves and there exists within those souls an eagerness to see what is next. With those souls the journey is far easier and they progress away from the initial physical plane much more rapidly than those souls who wish to come back and be dictated to by the Field once again. Then there are those souls who, fairly instantly upon leaving the physical plane, regain knowledge of who they were before they came to the earth plane. For them it is simply a matter of remembering and re-instanting their personality as an advanced soul and then gaining instant admission to the sphere from which they have come and to which they can gain entry again.

He describes the various spheres of existence and talks about the Lords of Karma, souls who 'have evolved to a point where they have been given custody of certain souls ... in the name of love' and are charged with placing each soul in circumstances where they can grow the most, both on Earth and on other worlds, and plotting out the course of their lives. However in what seems to be a radical departure from other examples of the genre, Joseph forcefully insists that reincarnation is never forced on anyone. People reincarnate of their own volition, because they are drawn in by the Field, wanting to go on having sensual experiences and/or to complete unfinished business.

So many choose to come back, and when they choose to come back, when the decision has been finally and absolutely made and we say to them, 'Are you sure?' and they say, 'Yes,' with an anger. 'Who are you to interfere?' ... they are already pulling themselves back towards the earth plane through free will.

I hope I've given a fair summary of the contents. There's no doubt about the sincerity of everyone involved. The books are attractively produced, and I'd judge them to be a significant addition to channelling literature. I'd also say the project has all the ingredients for commercial success, as the team behind clearly have a good idea about business, branding and marketing (see their website).

On the other hand I'm cautious about taking this sort of material at face value. Even if one happens to accept mediumship as a genuine phenomenon one is bound to wonder about the genesis of these 'spirit teachings'. The stuff about Atlantis is surely fantasy, and it's disturbing to see it being presented as fact. Certain odd comments seem to me to be neither true or wise, eg. 'The Buddhists are mistaken. They strive for Nothing, yes, but they strive for obliteration of the consciousness, which cannot happen,' Ditto the insistence that illness is just in our heads and that all medicine is effectively placebo.

This might not matter if the material is genuinely helpful. For people who haven't thought about it much before, to be stimulated to think about survival, and the nature of the changed psychological environment, is perhaps useful. But the underlying tone, in Revelation particularly, is one of complaint and exasperation: 'Message to Earthlings from Utopia: Your planet is horrible and your situation is dire! It's your fault! You must learn to be spiritual like us!'.

I realize some people find this inspiring, perhaps from appearing to be delivered by some wise being beyond our ken. But for all the obscure metaphysics, and the sermonizing about the need to change our ways, there is little of what would help us to achieve that. It's all about the destination, nothing about the actual journey.

If it's spiritual guidance we want, I'd argue we should look for it closer to home. Lately I've been re-reading one of Jack Kornfield's books, The Wise Heart, which offers practical advice on how to deal with issues such as fear, anger and resentment, from a human who has had to deal with these issues himself. I have to say, I find this much more helpful than listening to lectures about humanity's shortcomings.

I suppose a come-back to my complaints is that I'm not ready for this sort of exalted teaching. I won't argue with that. But I'm genuinely interested in the phenomenon of channelling and in the worldview that it promotes. Is it all a mysterious confabulation of human minds? Or is Joseph what he claims to be? And in that case, are such teaching entities perhaps themselves sometimes subject to the illusions they strive to warn us against?

Cold Reading

I mentioned cold reading in Randi's Prize, referring to the description by psychologist Ray Hyman. Hyman practised palm reading as a young man, until a respected teacher suggested he mix it up a bit, attributing a reading he'd given to one person to someone else. Clients believed in his psychic powers just the same, and that made him into a sceptic.

However a few people have pointed out that the real expert in cold reading is the British writer and entertainer Ian Rowland. James Randi considers him the world's greatest authority, which is good enough for me.

Rowland first published his classic book on the subject, The Full Facts of Cold Reading, in 1998. When I looked at it, quite a while ago now, I felt the techniques he described could not account for the best research, and left it at that. But sceptics are so convinced about cold reading, and talk about it so much, I thought I should give it another look.

Interestingly, body language only plays a minor role, Rowland says. Shrewd observation of appearance - of the type Sherlock Holmes astounded Dr Watson with - is more important, but is still not the main method. Obviously they can't be, if readings can be done over the phone. Although later he describes how he once correctly deduced from a woman's appearance that she had been a professional signer, which was pretty cool.

Fishing for information? Again, that's just part of it. Nor does it have anything to do with being credulous or gullible - many clients are actually quite smart. What counts is whether or not they know the trick.

Rowland also says candidly that psychics and their clients are mainly women. He believes that women's natural social skills encourage them to credit themselves with intuitive gifts. Men, on the other hand, cultivate an image of strength and independence, which isn't helped by seeking outside advice.

A good performer, Rowland says, will combine a number of different techniques. Some have to do with making general statements, others with giving accurate facts, others with making predictions, and so on.

Some of it is about 'Barnum' statements which most people consider to be accurate of themselves, for instance that 'you have a strong need for people to like and respect you'. But the book offers quite a few variations on this theme.

For instance, you can state that a person has a particular personality trait, but then also refer to its opposite as also sometimes being true. That makes sense to me. If you tell someone they are normally very calm but can also get very angry; or generally cheerful, but sometimes sad, and so on, you can hardly go wrong.

You can also use flattery, although best done discreetly, eg. the owner of this watch is a very impressive person. Two things that people especially like to be told, apparently, are that they are 'wise in the ways of the world, a wisdom gained through hard experience rather than book-learning', and that they 'know how to be a good friend'.

Offer rewards to make the client feel good and encourage her to believe the 'junk' you are telling her, Rowland advises. It's essential to praise her for being 'open-minded and receptive to many different kinds of wisdom'. Perhaps tell her that she's psychic too.

For older people it's a safe bet to say something like, 'you often wonder what happened to those dreams you had'. With younger people it's, 'you feel a sense of frustration that your talents and abilities are not given full recognition', which most agree with wholeheartedly.

My main interest was to see whether there is anything in these techniques that could explain the ability of psychics sometimes to produce quite detailed information. Many of Rowland's tips involve making vague factual statements that can be firmed up if they seem to be accepted. It helps to know where the odds are in your favour. For instance you can say something like, 'I sense there is a 2 in the house where you live', on the grounds that in a street with 50 addresses this will be true of 19 of them.

If you really want to impress, then go for ... drum roll ... the lucky guess. For instance throwing out a name at random and claiming that it 'means something to you'. Or 'I sense you have known someone for quite a while who has blond hair', but without making a specific connection.

If you do a bit of homework, and know what the main industries are in the area, you can hazard a guess about your client's occupation. You can make statements that are likely to be true, for instance that 'you have a box of old photos'. Or you can extract information by covertly getting feedback, for instance by asking at the end of a statement, 'does this make sense to you'.

Predicting the future you can talk about what the client wants to hear, eg about health and finance, tell them that 'things will get better soon', that 'someone new is going to come into your life', 'you will experience a minor injury, problems with an investment', etc, as long as you don't specify when. Or you can make predictions where the odds are 50:50, as the hits will more likely be remembered than the misses.

The book's gently humorous and well written, and I can see why it's been so successful. I've boiled it down - the statements are quite full and artfully constructed, and you would need to read the whole thing to get a full sense of how they might work in practice.

It's also one of the most deeply cynical things I've ever read, and after an hour or so I'd sunk into a state of extreme despondency. Not just at the creativity and craftsmanship that can go into deceiving people (it's not entertainment like conjuring tricks), but the idea that some people really are taken in by this nonsense. A double hit on one's view of humanity.

It did confirm me in my view that cold reading is not - in actual reality, as opposed to the sceptical imagination - a useful explanation of how the best mediums can come up with specific and accurate statements. I don't mean the, 'you have a bad back', or, 'you're carrying your husband's wedding ring in your bag' type, which I think it's fair to say characterise the gambits described here. I mean the 'you were recently hospitalised after standing on a rusty nail' and 'your husband called you Puggy' type. I think I've already mentioned somewhere John Edward telling a woman in the audience her dead father was laughing at her for mixing gloss and emulsion paints when she was redecorating. As far as I can see, nothing in Rowland's primer explains this sort of thing.

To do that you would have eventually to posit much more direct forms of cheating - eavesdropping on the audience, rifling through bags, planting stooges, and so on. It occurs to me now that this is one reason why cold reading is consistently offered as the explanation for what psychics do. It involves a certain degree of skill, and engagement with the client, so it seems less confrontational to accuse people of it than of covertly gathering information.

A faint subtext in Rowland's book is that it doesn't really matter whether it's true or not. He's clearly good at it and one gets the sense that he can give almost as much satisfaction to clients, who know that its fake, as if he really was psychic. People love sometimes to be the centre of attention. Here it's a man doing by numbers what a woman would do naturally and intuitively - engaging with an individual in a sort of celebration of his/her life.

Apparently the techniques have applications in things like management, negotiation, sales and marketing, and so on, which Rowland gives courses on. The book is quite pricey, but there's more information about him and the techniques on his website.