FT274


In the future, 2010 may be seen as a year when parapsychology posed some major challenges for mainstream science. And perhaps even more interestingly, the reactions of critics to these challenges may give – albeit unintentionally – a remarkable encouragement to fortean thinking of all kinds.

In spring 2010, Dr Barry Colvin published an acoustic analysis of poltergeist raps recorded around the world, over a 40-year period.[1] While poltergeist raps and normally produced raps sound similar, instrumental analysis reveals a different sound pattern with each of the alleged poltergeist raps. If this effect stands up (attempts at replication are being encouraged), it constitutes the first instrumental – as opposed to anecdotal – evidence for a spontaneous paranormal effect.

However, findings acknowledged as posing the biggest challenge to orthodoxy were announced in November 2010, emerging from research into pre-sentience – literally ‘feeling the future’ – conducted by Professor Daryl J Bem of Cornell University.[2] Prof. Bem has reported positive results from tests involving nine different sets of experiments into pre-sentience, indicating that the human body reacts to stimuli that have yet to arise.

The impact was heightened by the announcement that these results would be carried in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a public­ation enjoying an international reputation as the world’s leading journal in its field and for imposing stringent standards on contributors. The appearance of Bem’s paper in such a prestigious journal could not be dismissed, and it received widespread media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, forcing sceptics to take notice. Critics of Bem’s conclusions have broadly accepted that he was working to the established scientific rulebooks and obtained significant results. However, so uncomfortable are the implications, that some are now questioning how science typically operates, particularly with statistics.

From North America, there were immediate attempts at damping down the impact of Bem’s findings with an article by Prof. James Alcock of Glendon University, Toronto, published on the website of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI, formerly CSICOP). Faced with a peer-reviewed paper in such an august journal, Prof. Alcock held back from criticising the decision to publish. However, he argued that Bem’s research contains flaws and can’t be significant, as there have been similar false dawns in the past that failed to amount to anything. His sceptical fire-fighting efforts failed to address the issue that successive generations of para­psychologists have tightened their protocols, with psi-effects still persisting. Since the 1980s, the statistical technique of meta-analysis (which examines collectively the combined results of all known trials and experiments) has also been applied with precognition experiments suggesting that genuine effects occur. For his part, Prof. Bem robustly answered these points on the CSI website (which, to its credit, CSI published), and the argument is ongoing.[3] Parapsychologist Dean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe (1997) and Entangled Minds (2005), has also weighed in against the partial vers­ion of history presented by Alcock.[4] Meanwhile in the UK, an awareness that Bem’s research and that of others appears statistically sound has led the UK’s best-known sceptic Prof. Richard Wiseman to put out a plea that all attempts at replicating Bem’s experiments be reported to him, to undertake meta-analysis.[5]

But perhaps the most remarkable response so far has come with an editorial in the UK’s most popular science weekly, New Scientist.[6] Normally sceptical about paranormal claims, New Scientist was confronted with a potent set of positive experimental results to be carried in a distinguished journal. So under headings including “First proof of precognition? The truth may be even more challenging”, New Scientist openly declared Bem’s conclusions to be “breathtaking: people can perceive future events” but swiftly added the caution: “If that were true, it would turn our ideas about time and human perception on their head”.

Turning ideas of time and percept­ion upside down is still too much of a challenge, at least for the present. So New Scientist took inspiration (and perhaps comfort) from a paper by Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam attacking Bem’s research. Robustly entitled “Why psychologists must change the way they analyze their data: The case of Psi”, Wagenmakers argues that Bem should have used an alternative statistical approach, Bayesian analysis, which would then have suggested the evidence for precognition is weak or non-existent.[7]

However, this comes at a price, as Wagenmakers and colleagues realise. While dismissing precognition as impossible, with some irrelevant sideswipes about weather forecasters not employing clairvoyants and psychics failing to enrich themselves at casinos, Wagenmakers states: “Our assessment suggests that there is something deeply wrong with the way experimental psychologists design their studies and report their statistical results.”

In other words, if Bem is wrong, then a lot of other people must be wrong too. Grasping the implications, and simultaneously retaining some faith in everyday probabilities regarding replicating Bem’s results (“New Scientist’s bet is that most attempts will fail”) the NS editorial admits: “[T]he affair may bolster the argument that there is a flaw in the way most researchers test their hypotheses”. Ominously, it acknowledges that: “Many other published conclusions might collapse if subjected to similar analysis.”

This is radical stuff, recognising that findings from psi research pose “a challenge to mainstream science” not in demonstrating precognition but in showing that something is wrong with the way science deals with statistics. But is the possibility of precognition really so unlikely?

It is nearly 40 years since Arthur Koestler (1905–1983; see FT201:32–39) pointed out in his book The Roots of Coincidence (1972) that many of the ideas in modern physics – at both part­icle and cosmological levels – rout­inely deal with phenomena as extra­ordinary as ESP and anything in occult literat­ure: the relativity of time, the bending of space, particles displaying “spooky action” at a distance, particles travell­ing back in time and many other mind-boggling effects. Bem is better placed to appreciate this than many, having originally qualified in physics before turning to social sciences. Indeed, (in an irony Charles Fort would have loved), the same issue of New Scientist showing such caution over Bem’s research carr­ied an article entitled “The Quantum Time Machine” about the teleportation and time-travelling possibilities of phot­ons at the quantum level. With regard to the strangeness of modern physics, it is interesting to note the somewhat flippant response by Wagenmakers – a footnote declaring that, although the fall of the Twin Towers was an event consistent with physics, it does not mean conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terrorist attacks are true.[8]

Actually, the intellectual chall­enge is determining whether weird quantum effects have equivalents on the human scale, within the brain.[9] This is more problematic for science than philosophy. Bem’s research has huge implications for concepts such as causation, experience and free will, but it may be noted that as long ago as 1781 Immanuel Kant argued that the real nature of space and time must be different from our experienced sense perceptions of them – nearly 150 years before 20th-century physics established the same.[10] Unfortunately, relatively few modern philosophers have kept apace with both quantum physics and developments in psychical research. Perhaps contemporary philosophers are wisely fence-sitting, waiting for science to make its mind up!

Such caution may be advisable (though it is certainly not inspiring), since suggestions that significant results in psi-testing originate in flaws in the ways scientists use and understand statistics have appeared before. Speculating that statistical analysis is at fault has echoes of an argument in parapsychology which flared up over half a century ago. And perhaps more alarmingly, such critiques open up discussion of even more extraordinary ideas, though neither Bem’s critics nor New Scientist have realised this.

In 1954, mathematician G Spencer Brown argued in an article in Nature that significant results in psi experiments might be due, not to some para­normal effect, but to unsoundness in normal statistical methods.[11] In short, they were statistical freaks. Brown raised further arguments in a book, Probability and Scientific Inference (1957), maintaining that statistically significant results of the same order as those arising in psi tests had been obtained by matching columns of numbers taken from random number tables. He further suggested that control tests often give just as significant results as do the actual experiments, showing that such effects are due to an inherent non-random behaviour of cards and dice, not to ESP or PK as researchers concluded. Most radically, Spencer Brown argued there may be something wrong with the logical basis of our ideas of probability, hence the peculiar experimental effects.

Almost certainly without realising it, Bem’s critics today are reviving such spectres. Although Brown’s statistical challenge rumbled on for some years, it eventually petered out in the 1960s. No one felt inclined to follow Brown’s path, particularly after one critic, Christopher Scott, dismissed Brown’s arguments as “almost without except­ion either erroneous, irrelevant or frivolous” in the course of a detailed point-by-point rebuttal.[12]

Fifteen years after what became known as the “Spencer Brown inter­vention”, the problem of randomness in psi testing was re-examined again, in experiments by Robert Harvie. These were detailed in The Chall­enge of Chance (1973), co-authored with Sir Alister Hardy and Arthur Koestler. Harvie selected, at random, sequences amounting to 50,000 digits from random number tables. These represented the “target cards” in ESP experiments. The subject’s guesses were replaced by numbers produced by a computer – pseudo-random digits, so-called because they were not strictly random but produced by an algorithm.

Using this procedure, Harvie found the number of correct guesses or matches produced was significantly less than that predicted by chance. Experiments were also conducted with mass picture-drawing tests that failed to show telepathy, but indicated that some very strange coincidences were taking place within control experiments. But more disturbingly, the authors of The Challenge of Chance went further than Spencer Brown in seeing this as more than evidence of our statistical concepts being awry. The authors tentatively explored the idea that somewhere between causality and pure chance, there lies a fundamental principle of nature still awaiting discovery. This might be described as a yet-unknown principle of probability linking different events without a causal connection. From this perspective, what we might call telepathy, clairvoyance, precognit­ion, psychokinesis, and meaningful coincidences are all merely different manifestations, under different condit­ions, of the same universal principle. Perhaps some mysterious process is at work, as yet unrecognised and acting independently of space and time constraints. As the authors admitted, this was a short step to the theories of psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961) and his ideas of synchronicity linking meaningful events in a non-causal way (see FT171:42–47).

Jung himself had conveyed these ideas in a letter to the English psych­ical researcher Tony Cornell in a letter in February 1960. Jung stated: “I do not believe that synchronistic (or Psi) events are due to any supranormal faculties of the human mind, but rather they are relatively predictable events, which must occur, if Space, Time and causality are not axiomatic, but only statistical truths. They occur by themselves and not because we think that we possess a particular faculty to perceive them.” (Jung’s emphasis)[13]

Effectively, Jung’s concepts of synchronicity and meaningful coincid­ences dispense with the problem of humans possessing powers of telepathy or seeing into the future; rather our ordinary senses just notice strange events occurring from the operation of this universal principle. Parapsycho­logists have often been criticised for not coming up with a workable theory to explain psi results, but Jung’s idea has the advantage of incorporating all psi phenomena, including those occurring outside controlled environments. As Fortean Times has illustrated for years, the vast majority of extraordinary events occur not inside laboratories but in the wider world, including apparitions, poltergeists, premonitions and all manner of oddities. All may be interpreted within Jung’s framework as expressions of archetypes from the collective uncons­cious, working in accordance with this unrecognised principle.

Undoubtedly this is not a conclusion that New Scientist, Bem’s critics, nor even most parapsychologists would entertain; it would mean that both mainstream science and parapsych­ology are in error. But in raising flags of objection regarding established statistical techniques and findings, Bem’s critics may also be inadvertently launching fleets of speculative ideas sailing under the scientific equivalent of the skull and crossbones. At the very least, these challenges to scientific orthodoxy will surely prove an encouragement for forteans and individual thinkers everywhere.




Notes
1 “The Acoustic Properties of Unexplained Rapping Sounds”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol.73.2 no.899 pp65–93, April 2010. See FT265:5.
2 Daryl J Bem: “Feeling the Future: Experi­mental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect”. A version has also been published by Bem on his personal website; FT270:4.
3 'Response to Bem's comments', by James Alcock, csicop.org.
4 Dean Radin’s blog Entangled Minds.
5 See richardwiseman.com.
6 New Scientist, 20 Nov 2010.
7 Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Ruud Wetzels, Denny Boorsboom & Han van de Maas: “Why psych­ologists must change the way they analyze their data: The case of Psi”, at ruudwetzels.com. Bayesian analysis involves an assessment of conditional probabilities using Bayes Theorem which originated with the Rev. Thomas Bayes, a dissenting minister from Tunbridge Wells and which was presented posthumously to the Royal Society in 1763.
8 Ibid, note 7, footnote 2.
9 See AG Cairns Smith: Evolving the Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
10 Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, 2007 ed., Palgrave Macmillan; Bryan Magee: Confess­ions of a Philosopher, 1997.
11 G Spencer Brown: “Statistical Significance in Psychical Research”, Nature, vol. 172, No.4369, 25 July 1954.
12 Christopher Scott: “G Spencer Brown and Probability: A Critique”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research vol.39 pp217–34, 1957.
13 Author’s copy of a letter from CJ Jung to Tony Cornell, 9 Feb 1960.