Chapter 1
The First Black Swan: Psychokinesis
I
have a bowl in my house that is filled with the remains of various pieces of
cutlery that are not exactly usable. These are forks and spoons and an
occasional knife that used to be good-quality stainless steel cutlery, but
which now are just . . . strange. Every so often I give a workshop for people
who want to learn how to access their psychic selves. The format varies some,
depending on the time available. Yet, no matter how long the workshop—a day, a
weekend, or a week—the one skill people always want me to teach them is
spoon-bending.
To be honest, I’m not quite sure why
spoon-bending is so popular. It’s really a bit of a party trick rather than
anything profound. But maybe it’s just that a warped fork is tangible evidence
that they have done something unusual. When you go home with a fork that is
bent and twisted into strange shapes, you have absolute proof that you did
something extraordinary.
Spoon-bending is definitely a skill
that has fallen on hard times. It had been extremely popular in the 1970s as
celebrated psychic Uri Geller rose to fame as a spoon-bender extraordinaire,
until in 1973, he was caught cheating on national television, on the Tonight
Show. He was declared a fraud. He was
pilloried by all and virtually drummed out of the United States.
Now to be fair, Geller did
cheat. Everyone agrees on that, even him. What is often not
heard is why he cheated. According to his side of
the story, he was blindsided by that request, not expecting to be forced into
demonstrating his skills in that particular venue. Furthermore (again from his
perspective) he was exhausted, stressed, and simply not in the right frame of
mind to be doing anything psychic, yet he felt hounded to perform on
television. Still young and desperate not to look bad by refusing, he resorted
to cheating.
Do I believe this story? Well . . .
perhaps. Knowing what I know about doing any psychic function, Geller’s story
is credible, at least in the basics. Psychic functions, like all other human
talents, are not perfect all the time. No one—no one—can
perform at their peak at any hour, day or night, or continuously, or on demand
under stressful circumstances. That applies just as much to a top athlete, an
exceptional musician, or a terrific student. Human beings simply aren’t
perfect. And the public pressure to be perfect—particularly in any psychic
field where people are simply waiting for you to fail—is overwhelming. A young
man (he was only twenty-seven at the time of that infamous Tonight
Show debacle) who had grown accustomed to
acclaim might easily be tempted to mix stage magic with psychic skills. So . .
. I think the verdict is “unproven” in this case, no matter whether you’re
trying to prove Geller’s abilities or his lack of them.
It is also true that after that
episode, a number of scientific studies conducted in Europe under extremely
rigorous conditions validated his innate ability to manipulate matter with his
mind. Here in the United States, however, his reputation seems forever tainted
by that Unfortunate Incident.
A decade ago, however, I would have
laughed to scorn anyone who defended the “fraud” Geller. Why my change of
heart? Because I can spoon-bend. And I’ve taught close to a thousand other
people to do it, too. I now understand that not only is spoon-bending possible,
but also most anyone can learn to do it—and pretty easily, too. I’ve taught
people to do it in small workshops, and in huge ones with hundreds of people.
And in one memorable interview on Coast to Coast AM with
George Noory, he asked if I was willing to try to teach people to spoonbend
over the radio. I said I’d never tried that before, but I’d give it a shot. As
it turned out, it was hugely successful, with one listener even calling in to
say he had no cutlery handy, so he’d bent a large screwdriver instead!
A
few years ago I was attending a workshop given by my good friend Robert Bruce.
He is a renowned Australian mystic, whose work in energy and out-of-body
experiences is some of the most effective in the world—and he’s an incredibly
charming and funny man in person. At any event, on the second or third day of
this five-day program, I asked him if he ever used his energy exercises to
teach people to spoon-bend. He told me he’d never done it himself, so he didn’t
teach it. Was I willing to show the group how to do that?
That night I went to the local KMart
and bought enough good-quality cutlery for the smallish group to learn
spoonbending. When the time came the next day, I handed out forks (I strongly
prefer to teach people using forks rather than spoons for reasons I’ll explain
later), and proceeded to use Robert’s energy exercises to get people to bend
their forks. As I have come to expect, everyone in the class succeeded
brilliantly, and within fifteen or twenty minutes, we had a whole menagerie of
twisted cutlery sculptures.
The next morning, one of the women in
the workshop came in and said she had to tell us what happened the night
before. It turns out that this lady was dining with friends at quite a nice
local restaurant. During the dinner, the talk turned to politics, a subject she
was passionate about. She got a little, um, enthusiastic while talking with one
of her friends. She was making her point rather forcefully and wagging her fork
at the person she was speaking to, as you might wag your finger at someone. And
.
. . the fork drooped and melted in her hands.
She was so
embarrassed!
She hurriedly pulled the fork out of
sight onto her lap and, hiding her actions with the tablecloth, tried to put it
back into its original form. She never did get it quite right, of course . . .
the specific curves and angles of cutlery are difficult to replicate by hand,
particularly under cover of a tablecloth when you’re upset!
So the lesson from this is: If you
must spoon-bend when you’re dining out, spoon-bend responsibly.5
The
bottom-line conclusion I have drawn about spoon-bending is that it is one of
the absolute easiest psychic skills to learn, at least at the elementary level
I teach it. (Far from television worthy,
I
might add!) And why do I prefer to teach people to bend forks rather than
spoons? Because forks are a little bit harder. With a spoon, about the only
thing a beginner can do is to twist the spoon at the neck, where the bowl meets
the handle.6 That’s
far too easy to do, even in fairly sturdy cutlery. But if you’ve ever taken a
good-quality stainless steel fork and tried to bend just one tine with your
fingertips, you know that it’s all but impossible to do. I ask people to try to
bend their forks with their fingers before we start the spoon-bending process,
just to make sure they’re convinced they can’t do it. Only then do I start
guiding them in how to spoon-bend.
The basic process is one of running
energy through the fork to soften it. I teach people some simple exercises on
manipulating chi energy; then I get them to run that energy through the fork
for a few minutes, concentrating on setting their intentions that the fork
soften and bend.7 As they
do that for a while—as little as a minute or two, or as much as five or six
minutes, depending on how good they are at running energy and holding their
concentration on what they’re doing—the fork really does soften. At that point,
they can bend, twist, warp, and distort it however they like—including twisting
individual tines. When they have it twisted it into the configuration they
like, they put the fork down and don’t touch it for three or four minutes. When
they pick it up after that break, the fork has “set” in that new shape and is
as hard and stiff as it was before. If they want to change the shape again,
they have to start the process from scratch.
It’s true that my success rate is not
quite 100 percent. I find that two kinds
of people have trouble learning to spoon-bend. One set is people who are themselves
quite low in chi, or life energy. This is usually people who are elderly or who
have a serious illness. They barely have enough chi to keep themselves going,
let alone some left over for softening stainless steel.
The other type is someone who is
convinced that it cannot work. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve taught a lot of
skeptics to spoon-bend, to their astonishment. The very first time I tried to
teach spoon-bending, the group included a PhD physicist and a PhD
anthropologist, each of whom individually assured me that spoon-bending was a
total fake, all because of the flap over Uri Geller’s Tonight
Show debacle. Yet, they were willing to
humor me and give it a try. They took less than five minutes to become amazing
successes. The physicist in particular had ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis),
so he had very poor strength in his hands, yet he succeeded at bending his
fork.
I also remember one workshop in which
there was a participant who was a professional magician. At the break before we
started the spoon-bending exercise, he came up to me and assured me that it was
all a fake8 and that
he knew at least a dozen different ways to fake spoon-bending. I listened to
him as he listed them all; then I assured him he wouldn’t have to use any of
those fakes in the workshop—he could do it for real. He was skeptical but had
an open mind and was willing to give it a try. Twenty minutes later, he came up
to me, showing a wildly twisted fork and jubilantly said, “I did it! I don’t
have to fake it anymore! I can really do it!”
The type of skeptical person who fails
is the one who is so convinced that it can’t be done that she refuses to
actually try— or subconsciously refuses to allow herself to try. I ran into one
of those in a workshop with a number of scientists. While claiming to have an
open mind, when it came to the spoon-bending part, one in particular simply
could not get her fork to bend. I tried everything I could think of to help
her, short of bending it myself: running extra energy through it with her,
helping her focus and concentrate, and so on. Nothing worked. I could see she
appeared to be trying to bend
it but . . . nothing. Finally, I actually touched her fork . . . and it was so
soft it was practically like squishy butter! Clearly, she’d made it so soft and
malleable that a small child should have been able to bend it—yet when I again
encouraged her to try to bend it, she still claimed she couldn’t, that it was
too stiff. It seemed to me that her fingers were working against each other,
something like doing an isometric exercise, where a lot of effort is expended
yet nothing actually moves. My guess is that she has never been able to bend a
spoon and likely never will.
As with any psychic (or physical)
skill, you can convince yourself you are incapable of doing it. Yet, the truth
is, as best I can tell from my totally unscientific observations of hundreds
and hundreds of people, most people, possibly almost all people, can do
spoon-bending. It’s easy to learn, easy to do, and when you do it yourself—as
opposed to watching someone do it on the stage— you
know for a fact that it’s not a fake.
And that’s exactly why I teach this
particular little party trick so often in workshops. When I teach people about
chi energy, it all sounds airy-fairy and nonsensical to anyone with a
scientific mindset—it certainly did to me when I first heard about it. Even
when I show people that they can literally feel the energy moving around their
bodies, they often have the same reaction I initially had, that it’s all imagination
and none of it is anything more than self-delusion. Yet, when I teach people to
take that same “imaginary” energy, run it through a fork for a few minutes, and
then feel solid stainless steel soften enough to become soft and malleable in
their hands, suddenly what was nonsensical and imaginary becomes very, very
real.
So perhaps that’s the real reason for
the popularity of spoonbending. If you learn to do even one thing that
conventional science deems wildly impossible, you begin to believe that other
things are possible, too.
Spoon-bending
is of course only one of many manifestations of psychokinesis. People have been
known to have a wide variety of psychokinetic skills, including
• lighting light bulbs in their hands,
• sprouting seeds by holding them in
the palm of the hand,
• moving objects without touching
them,
• changing how dice roll or roulette
wheels spin to force a specific result,9
and
• influencing random events (such as
with a random number generator) to force a specific trend in results over many,
many trials.
Again,
these are only examples of skills that have been studied. While my experience
has been primarily spoon-bending, I did once try sprouting seeds in the palm of
my hand. It was, well, not exactly either a success or a failure. Here’s what
happened.
I was preparing for a new workshop I
planned, and I wondered if I could manage to teach people how to sprout seeds
in their palms—in spite of the fact I’d never done it myself, nor even seen
anyone else attempt to do it. Someone had mentioned to me that it was possible
to do it, so I figured I’d give it a try. If I could manage the trick, I’d
think about adding it to the workshop.
I got some vegetable seeds from my
local nursery and gave them a little soak in water for about an hour. This
particular type of seed was supposed to have a seven- to ten-day sprouting time
once planted. After that brief soak, I sat down in my favorite meditation
chair, put about three seeds in the palm of my hand, and started doing the same
energy process that I use for spoonbending. (I have no idea if this is how
people who know how to sprout seeds do this—it’s simply the process that I
tried.) I was very careful to hold my hand steady by propping it on a pillow so
I wouldn’t accidentally tip it. I cupped my other hand over the one holding the
seeds and started running energy between my palms. After a few moments, I felt
something very odd—a flash of heat and light combined with a shock, a bit like
an electric shock. Startled, I uncovered my palm holding the seeds to see if
they had sprouted. They hadn’t.
Instead, they’d disappeared.
So much for my seed-sprouting
abilities. I never did add seedsprouting to my workshops. Probably that’s just
as well, don’t you think?
A couple of points about this aborted
seed-sprouting effort are important. One thing is that when you’re working with
these energies, you sometimes get results that are not what you intend. Was I
trying to make the seeds disappear? Not at all. It never occurred to me to even
try to do that. Nonetheless, that’s what I accomplished. Particularly in a case
like this where I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, never even having seen
someone else do it, it was likely a little foolhardy on my part to attempt
seedsprouting. Maybe someday I’ll get someone to show me how to do it
correctly.
Another key point to remember is that
the energies you work with when doing psychic work are significant. These
are not toys or games. I
cannot emphasize that enough. Working with life energy and altered states of
consciousness is serious business. These energies are powerful and they can do
things to you and to other people that are not so pleasant. Fooling around with
psychic skills is highly risky unless you learn how to do it under the guidance
of a competent, caring, and highly ethical instructor. It is especially risky
when you lack the discipline and maturity to use these skills wisely instead of
arrogantly. While not quite as dangerous as handing a four-year-old a loaded
pistol to play with, the impact of careless, irresponsible “play” in these
arenas can have serious consequences.
On second thought, maybe playing
around irresponsibly with psychic skills is more dangerous
than handing a four-year old a loaded pistol.10
If
psychokinesis is impossible, what are we to make of other reports by
researchers in which some amazing effects are noted? For example, Dong Shen
reports on a Chinese experiment in which solid matter (a piece of paper)
apparently passed through other solid matter (a capped plastic canister)—and did
so instantaneously— or at least so quickly that no one observing the scene saw
it happen.
Shen described a program in which
Chinese volunteers are trained to see a “third eye” screen behind their
foreheads by entering a trained state of “second consciousness.” When in this
state, they can visualize an object being other than where it is— and the
object relocates to a new location. Here’s how it works.
A capped black plastic canister, such
as that holding 35mm film, is used to hold a piece of paper. The paper,
prepared in secret, has something written on it, unknown to everyone except the
preparer. The preparer also folds it in a personally unique way and places it
in the plastic canister where the cap seals the paper inside. An independent
observer monitors the preparation of the paper and the canister but cannot see
what is written on the paper.
In the experiment Shen witnessed, the
main participant was a seventeen-year-old with only a middle-school education
but who had received approximately six months of training in accessing this
second consciousness state. Once the canister was ready, the participant sat in
a chair one meter (a little over three feet) away from a table. The canister
was placed on the table. The two researchers plus five observing guests sat
also between one and three meters (between three and ten feet) away from the
table. No words were spoken during the experiment.
For about forty minutes, the
participant focused his attention on the plastic canister. Neither he nor
anyone else moved from their chairs. No one was close enough to the container
to reach it. Other than staring at the container and occasionally looking up at
the ceiling, the participant did not move.
After forty minutes, the participant
announced that the paper was no longer in the container. It instead had moved
about six meters away (nearly twenty feet) to the far wall of the room. The
participant also announced that what was written on it was “830,” in blue ink.
An observer checked that location and
retrieved the paper. The person who prepared the paper verified his own
handwriting, the content of the message, and that the paper was still folded in
the idiosyncratic way he had folded it at the beginning of the experiment.
There it was, just as the participant
had announced: 8-3-0, in blue ink.
There are many curious features about
this experiment. First, the participant had no demonstrable psychic skills
until undergoing the Chinese training program. Thus, whatever skills he
possessed at the time of the experiment were learned skills. Second, although
there were at least seven witnesses, all watching attentively, no one saw the
paper move out of the cylinder and across the room. Furthermore, the paper,
even folded as it was, was far too small and light to be able to be thrown for
that distance (nearly twenty feet).
Shen describes the subject’s efforts:
During the experiment he concentrated on
the black cartridge container and got it deep in his consciousness while
entering into the SCS [second consciousness state]. Then an image of the
container appeared on the third-eye screen located in front of his forehead. He
saw the image of the paper in the same way. At the very beginning, the paper
image was not stable and not clear. After he focused on the image for a while,
it became stable and clear on the screen. The number on the paper could then be
easily read, that is 830 written in blue, even though the paper was folded
inside the capped container. When the image of the paper was clear on the
screen, he started to use his mind to move the paper out of the container. At a
certain point he “saw” in his mind that the container was empty and saw in the
room that the paper was on the floor near the wall.12
It’s
easy to dismiss reports like this. They’re clearly idiosyncratic to this subject.
The researchers make no claims that everyone can achieve effects like this. And
yet, cultural biases should not lead us to ignore reputable reports, even if
they’re not conducted in western European or American institutions. The Shen
report discusses the prime candidates for training in psychic skills as being
children between the ages of eight and twelve (prepubescent) or young adults
between fifteen and twenty-two years who have limited education—in other words,
people who don’t know that they’re doing something that isn’t supposed to be
possible.
Is it the case that we educate our
children out of a whole range of abilities by informing them that they can’t do
them? Does the Western mindset force psychic phenomena underground?
What Is a Meta-Analysis?
Often, a single study doesn’t generate
convincing results, particularly
when the size of the study is small.
Generally, the most trusted form of
evidence for or against an effect is not
a single study but an analysis of
all studies that have been done on that effect. Doing a
meta-analysis
is tricky, however, because studies are
typically done by different
researchers, using different protocols,
with different degrees of care
in study design.
The primary reasons researchers do
meta-analyses are because
they are more general than any one
specific study. In addition, metastudies
can determine if any type of publication
bias is occurring.
They also tend to demonstrate if an
effect is specific to one particular
researcher or one specific study protocol
or if it extends to
multiple researchers and protocols. This
process also increases the
total number of participants or
trials—and in statistics, more data
means more significant data. If you flip
a coin five times, it’s not all
that unusual to get five heads in a
row—it happens about 3 percent
of the time. But if you flip a coin fifty
times, the odds of getting
fifty consecutive heads (or fifty
consecutive tails) are about 1 in 1
quadrillion (specifically, 1 chance out
of 1,125,899,906,842,620). In
other words, if you flipped fifty coins
every second, it would take you
well over thirty-five million years before you flipped fifty consecutive
heads or fifty consecutive tails.
There are many ways that meta-analyses
can go wrong. First, the
analysis is only valid if it includes all studies published on a particular
subject (or at least all studies in which
necessary analysis information
is included in the study report). How
individual studies are encoded
and selected for inclusion in a
meta-analysis is a subjective process. A
meta-analysis can be considered
trustworthy only if it explicitly defines
the criteria for selection and the
methodology of encoding the studies in
advance and explicates those criteria and
methodologies in its report.
All
this is well and good, but what is the scientific evidence that these are not
just amusing and interesting anecdotes? Does science in any way support the
reality of these experiences?
As it happens, it does.
Several types of psychokinetic effects
have been put under rigorous scientific scrutiny. These typically are
experiments in rolling dice to see if it is possible to influence the outcome
or in attempting to influence random-number generators to output
nonrandom-number sequences.
The short answer to this type of
experiment is that across about fifty years of studies, the effect is small but
highly statistically significant. For example, a 1989 meta-analysis of a half
century of controlled dice-rolling experiments showed highly significant
influence of participants on selecting the roll of a standard die. The results
were so significant that the chance that they’re merely statistical flukes is
more than a billion to one.13
In 2006, a controversial meta-analysis
of psychokinetic effects was published by Dr. Holger Bosch, Dr. Fiona
Steinkamp, and Dr. Emil Boller, from various European organizations. This
study, which for convenience I’ll refer to as the BSB study, performed a
meta-analysis of human interaction with random number generators. It is one of
the more frequently cited studies by skeptics as disproving psychokinesis.
Basically the BSB study searched hard
to find a reason to discount the possibility of psychokinesis. While noting
that there are strong statistical data supporting psychokinesis, and that this
evidence is generally of quite high quality in terms of the methodology used to
collect the data, the authors came down firmly on the negative side of the
question of whether psychokinesis is real. They concluded,
the statistical significance of the overall
database [of studies of human interaction with random-number generators]
provides no directive as to whether the phenomenon is genuine . . . Publication
bias appears to be the easiest and most encompassing explanation for the
primary findings of the meta-analysis.14
In
part, their claim that publication bias was responsible for the supposed
psychokinetic effects was as a result of their use of a funnel plot to identify
such bias. (See “What Is a Funnel Plot?”) The resulting chart clearly showed an
asymmetric funnel, which is commonly interpreted as meaning that larger effects
come from smaller-scale studies. When this happens, these smallscale studies
are possibly statistical flukes, like tossing only five heads in a row instead
of fifty heads in a row.
What Does Publication Bias Mean?
Not all research studies ever see the
light of day in peer-reviewed journals.
The reasons studies may never be
published include two critical
ones—and these reasons undermine how
science should be conducted.
The first such problem is that a study in
which the results are
inconclusive, or oppose the researcher’s
expected results or (worst
of all) pet theory of the world, very
often are stuck into a file drawer
somewhere and never written up. This is
horrific for science since it
generates a tremendous bias in favor of
currently popular theories
while suppressing data that tend to
undermine those theories.
The second problem is that a study may be
written up and submitted
to appropriate journals, but those
journals may decide that the
study outcomes are either results they
choose not to present (often
because they undermine existing accepted
theories or belief structures)
or are simply “uninteresting” because
they merely confirm
existing theories. The problem with that
is that having more data that
supports a theory means that confidence
in that theory is more secure.
What Is a Funnel Plot?
A funnel plot is used in meta-analyses to
determine if publication
bias exists in the reported studies.
Basically, it plots the magnitude
of the effect against the sample size in
each study. Ideally, it might
look something like the plot shown for a
meta-analysis with each data
point representing an individual study
included in the meta-analysis.
If the funnel plot is not symmetric, it
implies that there is some type of
publication bias, either for or against
the effect as a result of the sizes
of the studies. In other words,
small-scale studies might show favorable
results, while large-scale studies do not
(or even might show
negative results).
The dark lines on the chart reflect the
95 percent confidence level
for the studies, that is, that there is
95 percent confidence that the
studies’ correct results are between
those lines based on a statistical
analysis of the studies and the data..
Usually, the study size is represented by
the statistical standard
error of the measured effect. Most
commonly, the study size is on the
vertical axis, and the effect size is on
the horizontal axis. This type of
plot is convenient because a quick glance
at the distribution of the
studies can demonstrate whether they’re
approximately symmetrically
located within that 95 percent triangle,
as are the dots in the
example diagram. If they are
approximately symmetrical around the
center line of the triangle—the vertical
that runs through the peak of
the triangle—there is no obvious
publication bias; if they’re not evenly
distributed, if they lean more to one
side or the other of the center of
the triangle, it means there is a possibility of publication bias. Or there
might be some other reason for such a
distribution.
Problems can arise with using funnel
charts, including the possibility
that there really is a difference between
large-scale and smallscale
studies. Also, depending on how study
size and effect size are
defined, the shape of the chart can
change quite dramatically.
The
BSB study, as noted in the concluding statement quoted earlier, also ascribes
the positive results shown by psychokinetic studies to the “file drawer” effect
in which negative or inconclusive studies are simply buried in file drawers and
never written up for publication. (See “What Does Publication Bias Mean?”)
Doesn’t look too good for
psychokinesis being a genuine effect, does it? Well, not so fast. As it turns
out, there are some serious issues with this highly publicized meta-analysis
that show up only when the actual process used in the BSB study are examined in
detail.
Dean Radin, Roger Nelson, York Dobyns,
and Joop Houtkooper responded to this meta-analysis with an assessment of the
quality of the BSB study itself.15 They
note a number of serious problems with how that study was done. One problem is
that the BSB study was itself quite selective in how it chose to include or
exclude previous research reports in its meta-analysis. One specific research report
sort of included in the BSB study reported results from a total of seven
individual experiments, yet only one of these was included in the BSB study
analysis. Furthermore, the four largest studies included in the BSB report all
had their data seriously underreported—and those four studies contained more
than three hundred times as much data as all the other small-scale studies
included in the BSB report combined. These four studies by themselves are so
large that Radin et al. claim that “the overwhelming preponderance of data in
these large experiments should be taken as definitive . . . [because] the
remainder of the meta-analytic database [in the BSB study] comprises less than
half a percent of the total available data.”16
In other words, the BSB report threw out the vast majority of the data
available for its meta-analysis, giving excessive weight to the small-scale
studies while ignoring the statistically more important large-scale studies.
That’s definitely not how a
metaanalysis of anything should be conducted.
Radin et al. also noted that in
addition to throwing away nearly all the relevant data, the BSB study also
literally threw away two-thirds of the potential studies that could have been
used in the meta-analysis. As noted in “What Is a Meta-Analysis,” one of the
huge mistakes made in a meta-analysis of anything is arbitrarily ignoring
previous research papers and including only a selection of them—the selection
that matches the bias of those doing the meta-analysis. All
data and all previous research
needs to be included to construct a competent meta-analysis, not just data or
research that supports the biases of those doing the meta-analysis. This is not
the case in the BSB study.
Radin et al. reported yet another key
problem with the BSB study that is far too common in modern-day science. This
error is called “experimenter’s regress.” Specifically, the BSB report
concludes,
this unique experimental approach will gain
scientific recognition
only when researchers know with certainty
what
an unbiased funnel plot (i.e., a funnel
plot that includes
all studies that have been undertaken) look
like. If the
time comes when the funnel indicates a
systematic effect,
a model to explain the effect will be more
than crucial.
Until that time, Girden’s (1962b) verdict
of “not proven” .
. . with respect to dice experiments also
holds for human
intentionality on RNGs [random number
generators].17
As Radin et al. note, specifying this
kind of criteria is setting up a Catch-22 requirement for psychokinesis. Here’s
why. When an accepted theory predicts outcomes of an experiment, the theory is
tested merely by comparing experimental results with those theoretical
predictions. If they match within the limits of experimental error, everyone
rejoices and says the experimental protocol and measurement methodology was
“obviously” correct. Unfortunately, if experimental data and accepted theory
don’t match, the presumption is that it must be the experimenter’s fault. The
design of the experiment or the protocol or the methodology must be wrong. Or
the experimenter must have been perpetrating a fraud. Or the participants in
the experiment must be hoaxing the experimenter. Or something. It can’t
possibly be that the theory is wrong
because, well, simply everyone believes
the theory, right?
Right.
Certainly it’s true that not all
studies of psychic effects are well designed. Yet, at the same time, as the BSB
study demonstrates equally clearly, many of the studies that “disprove” psychic
effects are very poorly done and display a shocking amount of researcher bias,
poor protocols, and other mistakes that invalidate the conclusions drawn by the
skeptical authors. In other words, if it’s important to demand scientific care
in paranormal scientific reports—and it is—it is equally important to demand
the same type of scientific care on those reports that attempt to debunk those
studies.
Because no coherent theory exists for
psychokinesis (or any other psychic phenomenon), and because mainstream
thought— the “accepted theory” in today’s science—is is that psychic phenomena
simply don’t exist, any experiment that demonstrates a statistically
significant psychic effect must be wrong. In
other words, rather than letting actual, measured, real-world data control the
theory, theory overtakes observation. We’re not allowed to measure the effect
until we have a theory of how psychokinesis (or any other psychic phenomenon)
works, but without data, it is impossible to construct a coherent theory of how
it works.
Catch-22.
Before
leaving this topic, I need to point out one other little detail that virtually
proves our ability to impact physical matter solely with the mind. In the
1980s, Jack Houck became seriously interested in spoon-bending. As it happens,
he had access to metallurgical analysis equipment. As reported by Paul Smith,
Houck investigated the crystalline structure of metal that had been psychically
deformed (which Houck referred to as “warm forming” the metal to avoid
sensationalizing his reports), compared to metal that had been mechanically
deformed (as happens in all magician’s tricks, such as when the spoon is
surreptitiously pressed against the edge of a table, or previously deformed
with a vise and a pair of pliers). He also compared those with the
The First Black Swan: Psychokinesis 21 structure of metal that had been
subjected to extreme heat (such as
a torch). Houck took cross-sections of the three types of deformed metal and compared their
microstructures to determine what
types of cracks, if any, each type of deformed metal had at that microscopic level. Here’s
what he found:
Metal deformed mechanically, as a
stage magician does it, showed cracks in the structure. Metal deformed by
extreme heat showed a set of crystals that had been fused and melted. But metal
deformed using “warm forming” (that is, the psychically bent spoons bent at
ordinary room temperature, or at least skin temperature), however, showed
neither the fused and melted crystals of being subject to high heat nor the
cracks of mechanical deformation. Instead, at a microscopic
level, they had an intact crystal
structure, as if they had been manufactured in that physical shape. In other
words, the psychically bent spoons had the same microscopic structure as if
they were melted and cast in
the deformed shape. As can be seen in the photos of some of the psychically
bent cutlery from my workshops, such a set of silverware would be very
interesting, if not too functional.
The melting point of stainless steel
is approximately 2750°F (1510° C). I don’t know about you, but my hands simply
don’t get that hot. (Ow!) While skeptics may claim that it’s possible to fake
spoon-bending (and it is, in lots of different ways), I know of no way to fake
it that preserves the microscopic structure of the bent spoon or fork as found by
this research.
What’s even more interesting is that
science has known for more
than thirty years that psychokinesis works. Isn’t it interesting that it is
still dismissed as a party trick? All I can say to that is:
Some party trick, huh?
By Maureen Caudill
Genre: Non-Fiction/New Age/Paranormal
Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
ISBN: 978-1-57174-663-4
Number of pages: 256
Word Count: 66,377
Cover Artist: Jim Warner
Book Description:
Impossible Realities is the first book to examine the science behind psychic and paranormal activity. A former Defense Department expert on artificial intelligence, Maureen Caudhill provides evidence for a wide range of paranormal phenomena.
Impossible Realities presents a wealth of anecdotal and empirical evidence to prove the existence (and power) of:
Impossible Realities presents a wealth of anecdotal and empirical evidence to prove the existence (and power) of:
- psychokinesis (most famously spoon bending
- remote viewing
- energy healing
- telepathy, animal telepathy
- precognition
- survival after death
- reincarnation
Caudill presents the strongest case yet for bringing paranormal phenomena from the margins into the realm of the normal and credible. This is a book both for true believers and skeptics alike.
About the Author:
Maureen Caudill spent more than twenty years as a computer scientist, fifteen of those as a researcher in artificial intelligence and neural networks. She was a program manager and Artificial Intelligence researcher working on such advanced projects as DARPA (“High Performance Knowledge Base” program) and ARDA (“Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence” program).
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