Jesus died for you

[ANDY-J2]

[quote]Originally posted by CreepingJesus
[quote]We are talking about the analysis of thousands of experiments carried out by scientists under laboratory conditions over several decades

This is precisely my point.

The 1.2% variation from control which Radin's meta-analyses indicated is put in doubt by the inconsistency of his source material which came from experiments whose integrity could not be verified.

Radin's work may indeed be faultless, but the authenticity of the work of those who provided his source material cannot be verified.


When we combine the results of many thousands of experiments carried out in different locations over many years our confidence in the outcome greatly increases not diminishes-what are you suggesting?Thousands of test subjects and hundreds of scientists are engaged in fraud?Meta-analysis is an increasingly popular method of discovering whether the effects of any given experiements are replicated and is used extensively nowadays in both science and medicine.A small number of PSI experiments have produced effects which did not seem easily repeatable however when we are faced with such a mass of data all showing similar results there can surely be little question that what we are witnessing is a real phenomenon.



When later analyses were done by Milton and Wiseman using test results whose provenance was more reliable, the 1.2% result disappeared.


"When 10 new studies published after the Milton-Wiseman cutoff date are added to their database, the overall ganzfeld effect again becomes significant, but the mean effect size is still smaller than those from the original studies."

http://moebius.psy.ed.ac.uk/Text/Gz_Results.html





I would say that that casts doubt on Radin's results.

Radin's book appeared in 1997 and drew heavily on the work of Bern and Honorton.

Josephson's quote on the cover would come from that time also.

Milton and Wiseman's work was published in 1999.


This from http://www.csicop.org/si/9911/lilienfeld.html

Although some critics, like Ray Hyman, found statistical anomalies in the Bem and Honorton data set suggesting the possible existence of subtle but damaging experimental artifacts (see Hyman, R., Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 1996; and Hyman, R., Psychological Bulletin, 1994), Bem and Honorton's meta-analysis was regarded by many as offering the most compelling laboratory evidence to date for the existence of ESP.

This is essentially where things stood until a few months ago, when Julie Milton of the University of Edinburgh and Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire published an updated meta-analysis of thirty recent Ganzfeld studies not reviewed by Bem and Honorton. Milton and Wiseman's findings, which were published recently ("Does Psi Exist? Lack of Replication of an Anomalous Process at Information Transfer," Psychological Bulletin 125(4): 387-391), stand in stark contrast to those of Bem and Honorton and raise serious questions concerning the replicability of the Ganzfeld findings. Specifically, Milton and Wiseman reported a mean effect size across all thirty studies of .013, which corresponds to essentially chance performance and can most charitably be described as negligible.

Moreover, Milton and Wiseman failed to replicate Bem and Honorton's findings that a previous history of ESP-like experiences and the use of dynamic targets predicted enhanced Ganzfeld performance. (Because of insufficient information in the studies, Milton and Wiseman were unable to directly examine Bem and Honorton's other predictors, such as extroversion.) In contrast, Milton and Wiseman did find that previous participation in a mental discipline among novices predicted enhanced Ganzfeld performance. Ironically, however, a re-examination of Bem and Honorton's analyses revealed that this predictor was incorrectly identified as statistically significant in their original article, suggesting that the overall findings for the mental discipline variable in fact amount to another replication failure. In the words of baseball hall-of-famer Yogi Berra, Milton and Wiseman's findings appear to be a case of "dŽjˆ vu all over again." Seemingly replicable parapsychological findings have again proven to be disconcertingly elusive, and the experimental ESP literature has again proven to be consistently inconsistent.

Parapsychologists have already begun to raise questions regarding Milton and Wiseman's findings and conclusions. For example, some have criticized Milton and Wiseman for including a heterogeneous set of studies in their meta-analysis, and have pointed out that several studies in their database were in fact statistically significant. Nevertheless, Milton and Wiseman reported that a statistical test of homogeneity conducted on the individual effect sizes suggested that the studies in their meta-analysis can be regarded as being drawn from the same overall "population" of studies.

It seems likely that Milton and Wiseman's meta-analysis will not be the final word on the Ganzfeld technique, and the question of whether this technique will prove to be the replicable paradigm long sought by parapsychologists or merely another tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp is far from conclusively resolved.

It is evident, however, that the ball is now back in the court of parapsychologists, who will need to convince open-minded skeptics that the Ganzfeld technique will not go the way of J. B. Rhine's classic Zener card studies, Targ and Puthoff's remote viewing studies, and other superficially promising but ultimately disappointing ESP paradigms. Otherwise, it may soon be back to the drawing board for yet another paradigm.

It doesn't look to me as if anything's been proved at all.


I personally believe there is sufficient evidence to prove that PK and ESP are real phenomena.In any case the volume of well researched scientific evidence is such that skeptics cannot glibly dismiss the idea of psychic phenomena as trickery or fraud.Open minded skeptics must concede that it is difficult to provide conventional scientific explanations for these phenomena and the idea that mere chance could be involved is untenable given that the results have been replicated time and again under controlled conditions in laboratories.

[CreepingJesus]

ANDY:

what are you suggesting?Thousands of test subjects and hundreds of scientists are engaged in fraud?

Not quite. It is a fact that a large swathe of the data for the ganzfield database was obtained from tests conducted under variable conditions and experimental methodologies. This combined with reporting errors and what has been called the "file drawer effect" are reckoned to have a significant effect on the results.

Have a look at this interview with Robert Morris of the Koestler. He's (more than) broadly sympathetic to your point of view on this but he's prepared to admit that older research is a bit iffy.

(forgive the giant post - the quote's from a subscription -onlyservice so I can't just post a link - and the formatting's thrown out by the new board layout)


READ MY MIND: ARE WE ALL TELEPATHIC?
Tales of the paranormal

Photo: Murdo McLeod

It's a scary thought. What if telepathy is real, and we can read each
other's minds? And what if the paranormal is a genuine artefact of our
fabulously complex brains rather than statistical hogwash or fraud? Will
Robert Morris be the man to find out? For 15 years he's run the Koestler
Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, one of a handful of
centres dedicated to studying the paranormal. This lab is best known for the
Ganzfeld experiment, run since the early 1990s and the result of years of
negotiations between researchers and sceptics to devise a watertight test of
so-called psychic phenomena. The apparent success of this experiment made
headlines. John McCrone grilled him at the time, now he's back to find out
whether Morris thinks he's made any progress

What results are you getting?

The most recent Ganzfeld work has produced results showing that the odds
against there being some paranormal effect would be in the millions to one.

That sounds spectacular. But isn't your problem always going to be that no
matter how good your results, outsiders will say the experiments are fixed?

Well, yes. There is one definition of ESP as "error some place"--as in "I
can't quite find it but I know there is an error in there some place". My
feeling is that as we've progressed, and as people have read our research in
detail, more and more are saying that our research looks harder to beat than
they thought. Researchers need to get away from the notion of believing or
disbelieving. People don't talk about believing in other fields. I don't use
the word belief. It looks to me as though there is something new going on,
but it wouldn't blow me over if it turned out that there wasn't.

So what does parapsychology need?

Two things. One, effects of sufficient strength and consistency, so you know
something is going on that isn't readily understood by other means. And
secondly, coming up with a mechanism. One big question is whether we are
talking simply about one mechanism or three or four. If it is the latter,
then our job is a bit more complex because we may be lumping together
evidence for more than one mechanism.

Haven't you become more of a "believer"?

When I came here, I set the odds at about 85 per cent that we were studying
something that would turn out to be above and beyond what present-day
science could account for. During those years I've probably drifted into the
low to middle 90s. But I still remain confident that future scientists will
figure it out.

What's been happening to your results over the years?

Our results have been getting better. The two most recent Ganzfeld ESP
studies that we did actually have the highest outcome.

So how does the Ganzfeld experiment work?

Basically, the receiver in the experiment sits in a sensory deprivation
chamber, isolated in a sound-attenuated cubicle with walls a foot thick,
halved ping-pong balls over his or her eyes, white noise playing through
headphones, and dim red lighting. After some time, the person drifts into a
dreamlike state that is supposed to increase any chance of picking up
parapsychological impressions. Meanwhile, in another room about 80 feet
away, a sender is concentrating on a photograph or video clip selected
randomly by a computer from a hundred options to serve as the target.

What happens next?

The receiver describes aloud any thoughts or images being experienced. The
experimenter, who can hear what she or he is saying but does not know the
identity of the target video clip, sits in during the judging. During
judging, the receiver is shown a duplicate of the target clip and three
other equally likely to have been selected randomly as the target. Then the
receiver decides which of the four seems the best match. If the choice is
not influenced by the target, the "hit rate" will be only 25 per cent on
average. The isolation of sender and receiver should prevent cheating.
Inadvertent hints have been cut out, such as the greasy fingerprints that
might have been left if one manually handled photographs rather than used
computers. Our latest set-up has images downloaded from a hard disc, which
eliminates even obscure clues such as the time it might take a video machine
to rewind between clips. Data collection is automated, duplicated and
encrypted so that we can't bin or alter trials that don't turn out right.
The judging process is recorded so we can check if an experimenter had
cheated and was nudging a subject to the right result.

So, with a choice of four options, subjects should score 25 per cent by
chance. What are you getting?

One of my colleagues, Kathy Dalton, and a student of mine called Charles
Symmonds have achieved a hit rate in the high 40s overall. The main
experiment, by Dalton, gave a rate of 47 per cent correct, based on 60 first
choices out of 128 sessions--all involving different pairs of people.

Which subjects produce high scores?

Our best results were obtained with creative people--musicians and visual
artists. As far as personality was concerned, we didn't get any consistent
links between extroverts versus introverts or things like that.

How does this square with a review in the Psychological Bulletin (vol 125, p
387, 1999) which pooled the results of 30 Ganzfeld studies and found no
significant evidence for an anomalous effect?

That report didn't include the data that I've just been talking about. Some
of the studies they looked at represented a variety of different procedures
that people were try- ing--for example, to explore what kind of conditions
might be favourable or unfavourable. That meant they included some that had
quite strongly negative results--a product of processes we've been trying to
learn from. If you lump everything together, however, the results certainly
are statistically significant.

But the review was by former lab members Richard Wiseman and Julie Milton.
Has that hurt the Ganzfeld work?

One thing it certainly did was to clarify that some of the claims for the
Ganzfeld were a little premature. There were some who were beginning to say
we've always wanted an experiment in parapsychology that just about anybody
can use and get good results. And that's just not the case with the
Ganzfeld--you still have to use rather special conditions if you are going
to make some use of it.

What is the secret of using it properly?

Taking a lot of care with how you recruit participants, how you welcome them
into the lab, how you help them relax and feel as though it's OK to do well
or succeed at these kinds of procedures. It also seems important to select
participants from groups who appear to produce better results and avoid
those who don't feel they will do well.

Photo: Murdo McLeod

So the experimenter can affect the result?

That's where some of the work by Wiseman, now at the University of
Hertfordshire, and Marilyn Schlitz of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in
Sausalito, California, comes in. Wiseman has had a history of not getting
good results while Schlitz has done fairly well. Now they're trying to use a
similar approach, not with Ganzfeld but another experiment. Wiseman still
gets chance results and Schlitz gets positive ones. So they are also trying
now to look at films of themselves and see the different ways that they work
with people.

What is that new experiment?

It involves something called DMILS--direct mental interaction with living
systems--where one person attempts to increase or decrease the measured
arousal of another individual.

So would the person have electrodes attached to monitor their heart rate?

It tends to be electrodermal activity, so it would be like galvanic skin
response-- basically, sweat.

What about doing brain imaging studies?

We are at the planning stages now and we would expect to have the experiment
designed and running in the next five or six months. If this effect is real,
we want to identify which parts of the brain seem to be involved.

What other new experiments are there?

There are two other especially interesting experimental paradigms. One is
called beha-vioural DMILS. We are increasingly interested in an experiment
where one person attempts to increase the concentration of another. The
recipient is given a concentration task and asked to press a button whenever
they feel their concentration has flagged. Meanwhile, another person in a
distant location has randomised time intervals when they are either trying
to help the person concentrate or leave them alone. The second experimental
paradigm is called a presentiment procedure, where you show somebody slides,
some with very startling or disturbing images. You then test to see if they
are starting to show a shift in arousal a few seconds before the startling
slides appear on the screen.

What do your peers think?

Scientists view parapsychology more favourably if they see a researcher is
coming at it bottom up rather than top down. We may simply be uncovering
some additional aspects of brain functioning that we haven't understood very
richly so far. We're basically saying people have anomalous experiences
which they don't seem to understand, and we can help by applying the tools
of science.

Do you get personal attacks?

Not really. Perhaps because people know we are trying to do as good a job as
we can, we don't get people insulting us to our faces. Wiseman, for
instance, got his doctorate at our lab by studying some of the strategies
for faking special abilities. And we now have Peter Lamont on our staff, who
is a former president of the Edinburgh magic circle. So we are actively
looking at deception and the tricks of the trade, how we can fool ourselves
and fool each other. Most serious sceptics, the informed ones we deal with,
are saying that they've accounted for a lot of things, that there's been a
lot of sloppy research, but if it's possible to get some sort of new effect
with really well-done research, count them in.

In the wider context, didn't the CIA admit wasting $20 million on psychic
spying?

If you look carefully at what was concluded, they did not have evidence of
an effect that was strong enough to be reliably used in the field. But they
did not conclude that they had found a complete lack of evidence. Also,
there have been debates about how much of the total scientific evidence the
hired-in evaluators had access to (Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol
10, p 89).

What got you interested in the first place?

When I was in my early teens I found an aluminium box containing coloured
marbles that was sitting at the back of a shelf. It turned out to be a
device my parents had had built for testing parapsychological ability. They
weren't academics or psychics, but they took an interest. I asked them if
they really thought these abilities existed. They said, well, scientists
don't seem to know. I asked why, and they said, as near as we can tell they
are not looking at the evidence. And so that was the motivation. Not to
demonstrate that this stuff exists, or that it doesn't. But just to say,
let's take a hard look at the evidence.

Do you ever wish you had picked another line of research?

It depends. Sometimes I really wish I worked in something where all I was
doing was manipulating a few variables and I could have confidence that
every time I did a study I would automatically get a nice tidy result. But
on the other hand, I don't think that would have been quite so much fun.
I've adapted to having people thinking I'm wasting my time a bit. Frankly,
if I had it to do all over again, I would.

The search for an explanation

SO ARE there any even semi-plausible theories about how psychic powers might
work? Morris carefully explains the position that sober parapsychologists
like himself have to take.

The first rule is not to start theorising until you have some hard data.
According to Morris, too many psi-enthusiasts want to leap straight in with
talk about a quantum entanglement of brain states, a generalised mind-field
that pervades space, or some other wild mechanism.

A parapsychology experiment is only actually able to detect a communication
anomaly--apparent communication where there should be none. And given a
standard communications theory approach, the simplest possible theory of psi
is that some sort of "noise" reduction must be responsible for allowing it
operate.

Morris likes the idea that the psi signal is so weak that it can be picked
up better when the internal noise of the brain has been reduced. This is his
rationale for the Ganzfeld experiment.

But others, claiming correlations with fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic
field or even astronomical sources, have suggested that the noise might not
be in the brain at all, but instead be some kind of geophysical force that
masks our everyday experience of psi.

The Ganzfeld work at least rules out certain kinds of signal. The shielding
around the room--there to prevent subjects communicating via more prosaic
mediums such as various signalling devices--means that psi is unlikely to be
an electromagnetic wave.

Where things get sticky is that it doesn't seem to matter whether there's a
sender or not. Ganzfeld experiments that claim a positive result have also
been successful if the computer is displaying images to an empty room. Nor
do distance or time appear to inhibit the results. In psychokinesis
experiments, where subjects try to influence the output of a random number
generator, results have been successful when the subject was on the other
side of the world, or did their stuff several days before or after the
recording session.

For sceptics, this has simply strengthened their view that the source of all
positive results must have something to do with the set-up or analysis of
parapsychology experiments. For parapsychologists, it leaves them even
further away from concrete ideas about mechanism.

From New Scientist magazine, 03 March 2001.


As regards my own standpoint, I do agree with this bit:

"Most serious sceptics, the informed ones we deal with,
are saying that they've accounted for a lot of things, that there's been a
lot of sloppy research, but if it's possible to get some sort of new effect
with really well-done research, count them in."

The problem with this kind of discussion is the huge population of mystery mongers and snake oil merchants in the mix who are not in the least helpful.