Paranormalia

Patricia Putt - Score for Sceptics

What to make of the comprehensive failure of Patricia Putt in psychic testing recently?

I hadn't heard of Putt before, but she is apparently well established as a professional psychic, aka Ankhara. She has had media exposure, turns up at hauntings, exorcises, and does readings for £25 a go. She decided to go in for Randi's million-dollar challenge, and Richard Wiseman and Chris French were deputed to carry out the preliminary tests.

The experiment involved ten young women in turns sitting in front of her for a reading. They were all white, same gender and age-group to keep any identifying characteristics to a minimum, uniformly dressed in gowns, features concealed by wrap-around dark glasses and ski-masks, and facing away from her. There was no verbal interaction; Putt wrote her thoughts down. The ten transcripts were then handed to the subjects who each attempted to identify the reading that applied to her. Not a single one did so correctly.

This is a pretty comprehensive failure. One can make various excuses: the test doesn't prove that Putt isn't psychic (she might just have been having a bad day, and it doesn't prove that nobody is psychic. But although both these are logically true, it doesn't look good.

You can also argue that people who go for readings aren't heavily disguised, as the subjects were here, so Putt wasn't working in the conditions she was used to. But this is exactly what tests like this aim to do, to prevent any opening for cold reading. And, just as important, Putt was quite happy to go ahead on that basis. According to French, she felt that she had been treated fairly, and it was only afterwards, having scored zero, and having thought about it a bit, that she identified that as the problem.

It interests me that although this comes under the heading of Randi's million dollar challenge, it wasn't actually Randi who carried out this preliminary test, but French and Wiseman, who unlike him take a moderate approach to debunking parapsychology, and can't really be accused of setting Putt up for a fail. Curiously - and correct me if I'm wrong - there are rather few well-documented cases of psychics actually failing the challenge - we're just told that they are all kooks who never got past the preliminaries. The only other one I can think of was also quite recent, the case of Derek Ogilvie, whose failure in tests by both French and Randi was pretty total. But if it's so easy to demonstrate that psychism is a mirage, one wonders why, in the many years the challenge has been going, there aren't many more cases like Putt and Ogilvie.

One possibility is that psychics are too canny to let themselves be tested in highly unnatural circumstances, ie giving readings to people facing in the opposite direction and swaddled up like mummies. But apparently some of them, like Putt and Ogilvie, are naïve. They have boundless confidence in their own abilities and willingly walk into what others might see as a trap, agreeing to work in circumstances that they have never tried before.

Randi's million dollar challenge has always been vulnerable to the argument that there isn't any proper testing going on at all - it's just an opportunistic debunking ploy. But when people like Wiseman and French start to carry out very public and  transparent testing like this, it can start to be taken seriously by people who might otherwise have given psychics the benefit of the doubt. It's difficult to think of anything more helpful for the sceptics' cause, and it's interesting that this should only happen when the challenge itself is about to be withdrawn. 

Apart from the matter of influencing public perceptions, I'm interested in the science here. I take psychism to be real not on the basis of single tests like this, but on the accumulated data of psychical research. So I'm wondering why Putt failed. Some possibilities: she's not psychic at all, but just thinks she is; she is psychic, but needs to have a normal interaction with her sitters; as Greg Taylor at the Daily Grail suggests, the sitters might be sceptics who deliberately chose the wrong reading (unlikely, as Greg acknowledges, but potentially an experimental flaw); or that somehow French and Wiseman inhibited psi from manifesting - the experimenter effect.

If any of these, or a combination of them, is correct, it's worth following up. I'm thinking of the famous remote viewing experiments in which Marilyn Schlitz got significant results while Wiseman, using exactly the same setup and subjects, did not.  So let's get Putt back and have her work in the same circumstances with sceptics and parapsychologists, and compare the results. Or get them working with mediums of the first rank, like Colin Fry, for instance, or John Edward, who worked under controlled conditions in Gary Schwartz's first experiments, with sitters concealed behind a curtain and not speaking.

I suppose the conclusion is that we can't rule out psi unless we at least give it a chance to appear. Once we've seen it in action, we can fiddle with the parameters and see what's required to make it appear or disappear. Then we can argue about it. One-off tests aren't a way of establishing anything conclusively.

Could this sort of co-operation ever occur? I think both French and Wiseman might be up for it, if there was the organisation and the funds. But that's a big 'if'. I can't see it happening unless someone has the incentive to make it happen, and there's not much of that around at the moment. 

Online psi classes

Glad to see that Caroline Watt's new online parapsychology course is up and running. Watt is senior lecturer at The University of Edinburgh's psychology department and teaches in its Koestler Parapsychology Unit. The introductory course, designed by her, runs over ten weeks and costs £200, which seems pretty reasonable.

It's not about ghost hunting, as some might think if they stumbled on it by chance, but aims to give a scientific view of psi research. Students are given readings of chapters from the latest edition of Harvey Irwin's excellent Introduction to Parapsychology, co-authored by Watt, along with journal articles, and audio interviews with parapsychologists and skeptics. They include some well-known names, eg Stephen Braude, Dean Radin, Jessica Utts, James Alcock and Richard Wiseman.

The course seems to be getting a good response, to judge by students' comments on the site and a generally favourable review by one of the first participants, French philosophy student Louis Sagnières. Sagnières thinks the articles are a bit tough without a background in parapsychology, which I can well understand - I admit to finding some experimental psi papers quite hard work, and regret my lack of any grounding in science, maths and statistics. Classes are divided into groups of ten, and he says the amount of inter-group discussion seems to vary from one to another. His only real gripe is the University of Edinburgh website, which handles the course and, he says, is somewhat slow and clunky, although he adds that other students don't seem to have noticed anything amiss. 

Full marks to Watt for creating a channel that offers a grounding in the scientific arguments around psi. Hopefully it's just a beginning. If there's ever going to be a serious debate about it, there need to be people who understand the arguments, and the more educational sources there are the more informed the discussion will become.

The Koestler Doctrine

Last year the Guardian published what I thought was a rather inoffensive article by Caroline Watt on the benefits of teaching parapsychology. Dr. Watt, a researcher and lecturer at Edinburgh's Koestler Institute, agreed that most mainstream scientists are not persuaded that there exists replicable evidence of psi phenomena. But she pointed out that polls show around half of the UK population holding paranormal beliefs, and of these half have had a paranormal experience. So it makes sense to study it.

It's also a great way to teach scientific methodology, she added, for instance how to identify possible sources of bias or artefact or contamination in a research study and the use of tools such as meta-analysis for examining controversial claims - ideal for stimulating critical thinking.

This got the gremlins out in force. A few samples:

It is outrageous that they cannot learn this from conventional science such as physics, chemistry or biology. Parapsychology is pretty much wholly a pseudoscience other than the 'debunkers' and has no place in the science classroom.

There is nothing within this topic to teach; no accredited results; no credible theories; no un-debunked researchers. What *exactly* are you "teaching"?

And this:

OK, I won't call you "ghostbusters"...will dimwits do

When I was at school we dissected animals and studied their entrails to learn how the digestive system works. If only we'd realised we could tell the future from them too

It was the usual ignorant caterwauling, but I did connect with this remark by 'cynicalsteve':

She's trying to have her cake and eat it....if she (Watt) thinks there's something in parapsychology, she should say what exactly; if she thinks it's nonsense, then she should say that. But she says both (not neither) on her site; which is naughty. So she's nothing more than a professor of hypocrisy - not parapsychology - "teaching" something in which she doesn't really believe...

Of course it wasn't Watt's pragmatic fence-sitting that enraged most critics so much as the mere notion that paranormal belief and experience are worth studying - a phenomenon in itself deeply worthy of examination (their rage, I mean).  But not knowing anything about her background I was surprised when some friends mentioned to me recently that they actually considered her something of a sceptic, a-la-Wiseman. That seemed rather odd, considering her position at Edinburgh. So when she gave a talk this week I was interested to go along and find out where she stands. 

Watt, a lively and pleasant Scot, started by updating us on the situation at the Koestler Institute, which if some of the rumours going around were to be believed was practically at the point of collapse, having dipped rather freely into the capital of Koestler's bequest. That situation seems to have stabilised, but there isn't enough cash to pay for a professorship. So Bob Morris, who died a few years ago, has not been replaced, and instead there are just two lecturers, of whom Watt is one.

Watt went on to talk about work with Wiseman on paranormal belief, a subject which surely has been done to death. But she also described a couple of experimental approaches. A current one involves healing at a distance, and the results are expected later this year. The other involved an attempt to influence subjects engaged in meditation, by pairing them with a person, who from another room tries to help them reduce the number of distractions they experience.

The aim here was actually to test the 'experimenter effect'. It was found that there was no effect when the experimenter tried to influence the participants, either by expressing enthusiasm and certainty in a positive outcome, or by the opposite. But there was a significant difference between experiments led by believers and disbelievers in psi. (Bizarrely, the effect was not to reduce the number of distractions in the believers' experiments but to increase the number of distractions in those carried out by disbelievers.)

This struck me as a useful addition to the psi database, although as so often with these things it still lacks the replication that would make it stand out. And Watt's own position? Pretty much as stated in the Guardian, as it turns out: people obviously have these beliefs and experiences, which it makes sense to study, but as to psi itself, there is still not enough to totally convince other scientists.

This 'Koestler doctrine', I guess, will be the standard line in British universtities where Koestler graduates are teaching and researching parapsychology (eg. Northampton and Liverpool Hope). And why not? It's true as far as it goes, it's reasonable, and it genuflects enough to 'serious science' to keep the critics off their backs. A genuine interest in researching psi does not necessarily come with a willingness to endure controversy and notoriety.

But if parapsychology as a discipline is content with this I doubt whether it will win many converts. One could equally claim that there is abundant evidence of psi, both in documented surveys and case studies, for which sceptics have advanced little in the way of serious alternatives, and in a body of experimental work which consistently finds evidence of psi, both in individual interactions between subject and agent, and also in statistical anomalies which, again, are unexplained by knowledgable critics. If parapsychologists were not in such a precarious situation they would say this.

It's true that the subject helps students think about scientific methodology, but the critics are right, that's a smokescreen - it's not what this is really about.  If parapsychologists think psi exists, somewhere along the line they need to have the courage of their convictions and say so unambiguously, as indeed some researchers like Sheldrake and Radin do. They then need to explain exactly what the challenges are, and keep hammering the message home until at least some of the less emotional sceptics get the point.

It's on the teaching side that Edinburgh really may make an impact. Watt has just designed an online course in parapsychology, which is apparently attracting a good deal of interest (we were apparently the first to see it). This sort of thing really could make a difference, and I'll come back to it as soon as I've had a chance to check it out. 

Book Review: Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer - Extraordinary Knowing

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's book Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind was published last year, and recently came out in paperback (she herself died of a long-standing intestinal disease shortly after completing it). I'd heard a lot about the incident she describes, in which a psychic helped her recover a lost object. Mayer's natural scepticism was confounded, and she embarked on a journey to try to understand what was going on. Sceptics grappling with psi often makes for interesting reading, and although not quite what I expected I was not disappointed.  

As psychic stories go, hers is in the five-star class. Someone had nicked a harp belonging to her eleven year old daughter. Having failed to get it back by conventional means, a friend suggested she try a psychic. What had she got to lose?

Mayer called up a dowser named Harold, who said: 'Hang on, I'll check to see if it's still in your neighbourhood.' Then: 'yup, it's still there, send me a street plan'. Two days later Harold came up with an exact address. Mayer couldn't simply knock on the door, so instead she posted flyers outside offering a reward. A man then rang to say he'd seen a poster outside his house about a harp, and the description matched one his neighbour had recently shown him - soon it was back in her daughter's room.

I'd imagine it's the sort of thing which, if it happens to you, you couldn't very well shrug off. It's not somebody else's lie or fantasy - it happened to you. A mere coincidence? Not really.

Before I bought the book I had somehow got the impression that Mayer was a militant sceptic who had difficulty accepting the event (rather as if it had happened to Susan Blackmore, say.) The story of that epic existential struggle I think has yet to be written, and I look forward to it - this is something else, although at least as valuable. Mayer was stunned - 'this changes everything' - yet at the same time she seems to have been quite fertile ground for a shift of worldview. It makes sense: as a widely respected psychoanalyst she combined scientific training - and the orthodox views that go with it - with empathy, flexibility and a willingness to listen. These are qualities one does not associate with militant sceptics, but which are ideal for understanding the source of the disquiet that she undoubtedly felt. 

This psychological resistance to psi is surely one of the most important issues that parapsychology faces, yet there has been surprisingly little written about it. I seem to have read loads of boring journal papers over the years that explore the typical psychological profile of  the 'fantasy-prone believer', implying that they are a race apart. But there has been almost nothing about what drives scepticism, which in many ways is far more striking and anomalous - the inability to see any evidence of psychism, the tendency to disregard logical challenges as if they didn't exist, the intense agitation expressed in the aggressive language, and so on. The phenomenon of cognitive dissonance is well-known, but there's little public awareness of how it may affect anyone's responses to paranormal claims and experiences.

This is the strong theme running through Mayer's book. She was shocked to discover a whole world of experience and research that corroborated the harp incident - the kind of surprise that I think awaits a great many people.  She discovers the parapsychological journals, and reads about the Maimonides dream research, the ganzfeld controversy, talks to Hal Puthoff about remote viewing and Star Gate, and Robert Jahn about the PEAR research, and so on. She also has an interesting section on prayer experiments. But what especially fascinates her are the disturbed reactions that psi generates, from the notorious muzzling of psi proponents in the NRC report, to the peer reviewer who told a journal editor he could find nothing wrong with an article on telepathy, but still rejected it saying he wouldn't believe it even it were true.

It's not just militants who feel this way. She herself was unsettled by an incident in which, when hunting for a lost watch, she suddenly went onto automatic pilot, as it were, and found herself going directly to the back of a drawer where it had been hidden. She also has an interesting example from her clinical practice of a woman who, as a child, learned to intuit when her father was driving home drunk, giving her just enough time to hide herself and her younger sister in a closet so that they wouldn't get beaten.

During the late afternoons, I'd start listening for him. It was a funny kind of listening. It was like listening with my whole body, not my ears. I don't know how to describe it except to say I was tuned in, vigilant with every part of me. Suddenly I'd know - know he was fifteen minutes away and driving home drunk... My dad didn't drink all the time. So there was no predicting. I had to stay tuned in every day, be ready, and never trust any pattern.

But in later life this 'spooky knowing', as she called it, set off panic whenever it occurred.  Here Mayer refers to Freud, who argued that the human psyche is organized to escape the experience of fear. We use an array of defences to suppress and regulate it - usually unconsciously. We don't even know that we're defending, must less what we're defending against.

It's perhaps to be expected that Freud should feature often in a book by a psychoanalyst, but in this context also slightly surprising. If I hadn't read anything else about it I would be left with the impression that Freud had a real interest in telepathy, whereas I guess few people would consider his views little more than a footnote. Conversely she makes no mention at all of Frederic Myers, who really did have something original to say about it. I speculated this might be because she wanted to stick to contemporary work, or because Myers was motivated by an interest in survival of death, which she says somewhere she wanted no part of.

But in a way, her preference for Freud over Myers is emblematic of a view that regards as psi as a threat and a danger, rather than as an integral feature of consciousness and a window to a wider world. In that sense it describes, not psychical literature itself, or the views of people who immerse themselves in it and understand its implications, but the outside world that regards it with suspicion and hostility. Where Myers saw psi as an element of the whole and healthful mind functioning at various levels, Freud seems to have associated it with that dark world of dreams, a way of gaining access to an unconscious brimming with suppressed anxiety. As Mayer points out, Freud also abhorred the idea of 'oceanic' experiences, which he regarded as an infantile regression - he fled from music apparently fearful of the emotions it would evoke, and which he needed to control. But of course, it was Freud who went on to dominate the world, while Myers remains virtually unknown.

What's interesting about this book is that it exhibits a highly-educated and scientifically literate professional taking psi research seriously.  There isn't much of that about, but I sense we could start to see more of it - I found myself often comparing it in that respect to Damien Broderick's Outside the Gates of Science. These are writers who are not involved in parapsychology, and who are coming to it more or less cold. They can adopt an objective stance, but are nevertheless unafraid to go fully on record as being persuaded both by the experiences and the experiments. More than psychics or parapsychologists - who are seen perhaps as already embedded in that other world - readers will see them as guides, providing the reassurance that one can take this stuff seriously without going mad or turning into a figure of fun.

For others it will not be enough to see someone else making the journey - they will have to make it themselves. I don't just mean those shocking personal events which most of us may in any case never experience, so much as the experience of interacting with the research, of identifying all the potential 'normal' explanations, and deciding on their plausibility. That's rather missing here. Mayer's presentation of the ganzfeld and remote viewing, while generally fair, rather under-states the critical objections. It's right to point out that Ray Hyman couldn't find anything obviously wrong with the remote viewing and autoganzfeld protocols, but Mayer almost co-opts him as an advocate, or at least implies that he has thrown in the towel, both far from the truth.  About the PEAR work, she mentions that she scrutinised all the sceptical objections and was not persuaded by them, but does not give the reader any opportunity to make an independent decision.

Still, one can always do that oneself, and perhaps the virtue of a book like this is that it will spark interest. As I say, it does also make a hugely valuable contribution in underscoring just what it is about this subject that makes it so different, in the way that it messes with people's heads. This is surely what parapsychology has to work on, for its only when the causes of resistance to it start to be understood that its claims can really get a wide and serious hearing. 

Michio Kaku

I've yet to get a hold of Michio Kaku's new book The Physics of the Impossible, and most likely it'll be a while before I get round to it. But I'm intrigued by the publicity it's been getting, and its possible implications for parapsychology.

Kaku is a theoretical physicist at City University in New York, and a big player in the field of string theory. He's also a pretty effective science popularizer. He has got big attention with this book, only published in the UK today, by arguing that a lot of wacky ideas we associate with science fiction may not be completely impossible after all. 

Kaku puts forward three categories of 'impossibilities'. In reverse order, what he calls 'Type 3' include technologies that absolutely violate the known laws of physics, such as perpetual motion machines and precognition. These would require a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics. Type 2 are technologies currently at the edge of our understanding, but that might be possible one day, such as time travel.

Under Type 1, Kaku groups a number of things that are impossible today, but which do not violate the known laws of physics and so might one day become possible.  These include: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars, teleportation, telepathy and psychokinesis, robots, UFOs and aliens, starships, antimatter and anti-universes.

This is a pretty eclectic mix of ideas, theories and technologies. As to his reasoning, I'm a bit in the dark, as I haven't read the book. I understand that Kaku argues teleportation in terms of quantum entanglement - it's being done on the level of particles, so the principle is already there. Alien contact becomes more probable as astronomers scan planets in other solar systems, so that too is feasible. Robots already exist. He talks of invisibility on the basis of new materials that eliminate reflections and shadows. 

What gets my attention is the presence in the list of telepathy and psychokinesis. As I say, it'll be a while before I find out what his thinking is (comments welcome, in the meantime), but I'm guessing his approach is technology-based and that he proposes they will become possible when we figure out how to do them (in terms of parallel universes?)

Parapsychologists would have a couple of things to say about that: a) telepathy and psychokinesis are here now, and b) they don't involve technology. They would add that precognition, which Kaku thinks is really impossible, is closely associated with these things. But what interests me is how sceptics will respond. Normally they can't stand it when a high-profile scientists comes out in favour of telepathy, and they try to drown him out with a cacophony of jeering. I guess that won't happen here, though, because Kaku's idea of telepathy is precisely that it doesn't contradict known laws of physics, which is their main stated reason for objecting to it.

This is an interesting development. One outcome could be that Kaku's ideas could turn out to be too simplistic, and will be shot down by parapsychologists, pointing out that they don't relate to the considerable existing data. That would be a pity, although ironically since parapsychologists are so little regarded in the scientific community perhaps no one would notice. For even if the theory is not wholly convincing, it can only be a good thing if serious scientists bring psychism in the scientific arena. If the concept of telepathy can be raised without sceptics popping a fuse in public, perhaps the scientific world will start to calm down and talk about it rationally.