The Curious Conflict Between Telepathy Skeptics and Believers
Because something is happening here. But you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?
—Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”
In 2001, British physicist Brian Josephson was asked by the Royal Mail, Britain’s postal service, to write a short essay commemorating a new series of Nobel Prize–themed stamps. He could have just written the standard thing—extolling the virtues of science and urging kids into the field. But what he delivered, and the Royal Mail published, deviated more than a few degrees from standard. “Quantum theory is now being fruitfully combined with theories of information and computation,” Josephson writes. “These developments may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science such as telepathy, an area where Britain is at the forefront of research.”
The mention of telepathy, invoking the paranormal, caused a furor. And in response, some of Josephson’s fellow physicists railed to the press, accusing Josephson of having “hoodwinked” the Royal Mail into printing falsehoods.
Josephson, a Nobel Prize winner, is an avowed believer in telepathy. (In this chapter, I use the umbrella term psi, which includes telepathy and covers any theoretical ability to gather accurate information outside our five normal sensory pathways.) Claims of psi-ability have been with us for millennia. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that, in 550 B.C., the Oracle at Delphi predicted precisely when the king of Lydia would be boiling a lamb and a tortoise in a brass cauldron. Hardly as valuable as predicting, say, the winner of the Super Bowl. Still, the Oracle got gold and silver for her trouble.
Today, in the modern West, psychics can also earn their share of filthy lucre. But the mainstream view of psi is contentious, to say the least, and Josephson’s full-bodied embrace of psi is surprising—not least because he could easily have continued down the less nettlesome path he had forged for himself. As a graduate student, Josephson had correctly predicted that a phenomenon called “quantum tunneling” was more powerful than previously thought. His research led to Josephson Junctions, in which two layers of superconducting material sandwich a (very) thin layer of nonconducting material. This construction allowed electron pairs to “tunnel” from one side to the other, leading to a vast array of practical applications, like microchips and MRI machines. In short, Josephson’s discovery is among the most important technological leaps of the past half-century. But because of his interest in psi, some now portrayed him as a figure of disrepute. He had gone “off the rails,” they claimed in the wake of his offensive sentence, his intellect somehow damaged by his long-running study of telepathy.
“It is utter rubbish,” David Deutsch, a quantum physics expert at Oxford University, told the Observer newspaper. “Telepathy simply does not exist.”
BBC Radio invited Josephson to defend his position against two skeptics—the key one, for our purposes, being American James Randi. A former stage magician, Randi has been debunking all things paranormal for roughly forty years. And given the opportunity to confront Josephson, he attacked. The magician accused the physicist of invoking the “refuge of scoundrels” in referring to quantum mechanics and further claimed there was “no firm evidence” for telepathy a reputable scientist would accept. But there is a problem here. Because the evidence submitted for psi is vast, and so competently assembled, some more fair-minded skeptics have been forced to concede important ground. “I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven,” says psychologist and skeptic Richard Wiseman, in a January 2008 edition of the Daily Mail.
Remote Viewing (RV) is the claim of a real Mind’s Eye—the ability to see things and describe them accurately without being bodily present to see them at all. This seemed a startling admission. And Wiseman was asked to clarify. As expected, he claimed to have been misquoted—but not in the way we might think. He wasn’t referring only to remote viewing, he said. He was describing the entire field of telepathy—or psi research in general. What’s more, fellow U.K. skeptic Chris French agrees with him. “I think Richard’s right,” he told me. “For an ordinary claim, the evidence we already have would be sufficient.”
The issue, as described by both Wiseman and French, is that telepathy is no ordinary claim. The finding of an as yet undiscovered sensory capacity might force us to question all kinds of scientific truths—in physics and neuroscience, just for starters. So, the thinking goes, the evidence provided for telepathy must be as extraordinary as the claim itself. Which, they maintain, it isn’t.
It seems, then, when the evidence for psi is closely reviewed, the reputation of Brian Josephson can safely be removed from hell (the Landing Place of Scoundrels) and cast into purgatory (the Landing Place of Stuff We’re Still Debating). What we’ll learn here, in the muddled middle, is that psi proponents and naysayers seem diametrically opposed—like rival families in the Ozarks, pop-eyed with adrenaline that can only come from really, really wanting to shoot someone else in the heart. But truth be told, the skeptics are far more like the believers than they first appear. And in a very real sense, psychic slayers and psychic supporters are, shockingly, both right.
I WALKED TO MY first session of the Parapsychological Association’s (PA) summer 2009 meeting through a light Seattle mist. Though I knew that most of the leading researchers in the field of parapsychology would be here, I didn’t know quite what to expect. This was an academic conference, and the talks promised to be incredibly technical. But I did have an impromptu introduction to one of the weekend’s speakers. I had checked into a dormitory on the University of Seattle campus the previous night and run into a big, bald-headed man out by the elevators. The hallway was cramped, and we were ostensibly here for the same reason, so I introduced myself.
“How you doing Steve!” the man replied, pumping my outstretched hand as if we were old friends. Before I knew it, I’d been invited to sit at a desk in the tiny dorm room of Paul H. Smith, a former military man who had carried out remote viewing trials for the U.S. Army.
I’d come here, I thought, with an open mind. I’d read the scientific literature on remote viewing, pro and con. I knew the Army really did have a remote viewing program, investing money and facilities in a network of psychic spies. But until I sat with Smith, those were just words on a page. Remote viewing is such a strange idea. Theoretically, a viewer can “see” things with his or her mind—no matter how many miles away, underwater, inside cabinet drawers, and even in outer space. Not even time is a factor, as proponents of remote viewing claim to see the past and the future. Confronted by Smith, I was a little dumbfounded that this big, matter-of-fact Texan was here, talking to me about mind sight.
“I was skeptical about it, too, when I started,” Smith told me. “But I wanted to see if it was real.”
I wondered if I was smirking at him. Because seeing things at a distance just didn’t fit into my own personal experience, and seeing someone up close who claims to see things at a distance felt even stranger. I’d imagined that recruitment into this odd military experiment was conducted with equal weirdness. Perhaps the sergeant in charge read his morning coffee grounds? But Smith had been brought aboard after a couple of innocuous conversations with a neighbor on the Fort George G. Meade military base. The neighbor was involved in the remote viewing program, a fact he concealed from Smith. But when he saw Smith had some talent for drawing, he tapped him for a tryout. Over the next couple of years, Smith put his artistic talent to use—trying to see unknown targets with his mind’s eye and sketch them for his superiors. He had his share of success, he told me. And on that first night in Seattle, we talked for more than an hour—me mostly feeling odd that Smith himself seemed so credible, a plainspoken Texan who retained the upright bearing and polite demeanor of a career soldier.
The next morning, after worrying about whether or not my skepticism had shown, I kept looking in vain for some crowd of people all headed in the same direction, figuring they would lead me to the first conference session. But no crowd ever materialized. And it was only after I saw Smith walking across campus with the steady gait of a soldier that I found my way. The conference organizers at the Parapsychological Association had warned me the gathering would be small. Just how small came as something of a shock. I counted maybe thirty people on hand for the morning’s first presentation, a panel dealing with the role that belief systems play in science. “Dick Shoup continues to work on psi-related issues, undistracted by any significant funding,” read the bio of one of the panel’s participants.
The line got a nice laugh from the audience and set the tone for a real budget catering affair, all of it held in one college lecture hall, with a table out front at the breaks holding bottles of water, raisins, and the occasional cookie. In my capacity as a journalist, I’ve attended enough professional functions to know where the money is (trial attorneys throw the fanciest parties). And clearly, I found, there is no money in psi research.
On one level, this might not be so surprising. After all, the participants had arrived to spend the weekend discussing a phenomenon many don’t believe exists. Perhaps more commonly known under the heading of ESP, or extrasensory perception, the Greek letter psi is employed by physicists to depict a quantum mechanical wave function, and by paranormalists to cover four main areas of research: telepathy, or a connection between separate minds; clairvoyance, or “clear seeing,” which would encompass remote viewing; precognition, somehow perceiving events in the future; and psychokinesis, or PK, which might mean bending a spoon or influencing the output of a random number generator, affecting the physical world using only the power of our consciousness.
The attempt by paranormalists to co-opt a term employed by physicists probably speaks to two things: one, they think the mechanism by which a “sixth sense” works is physical, and scientific, not immaterial and unverifiable; two, they need, want, wish, long for the imprimatur of mainstream science.
In his 1979 paper, “Experimental Parapsychology as a Rejected Science,” University of Pennsylvania sociologist Paul D. Allison surveyed members of the Parapsychological Association. What he found was a small group of dedicated and demonstrably qualified psi researchers who reported that they had been routinely discriminated against by their mainstream, university bosses in hiring, promotions, publications, and funding research.
Thirty years later, after eating my share of raisins at the PA’s small, dispirited annual conference, I wondered if anything had substantively changed. I contacted Allison, who dug up a draft of the questionnaire he submitted. I reshaped it as an online survey, had a techie friend slap it on the Internet, and asked the PA’s current membership to respond.
What I found is that the relationship between psi researchers and mainstream science remains the same: more than half of my subjects felt they had been discriminated against or were aware of some kind of discrimination having been waged against a psi researcher. That figure was down only marginally from Allison’s survey. Further, nearly half of my respondents felt they had been denied funding or facilities for the crime of studying psi. I received just thirty responses, less than half of what Allison got. But these self-reports matched the downbeat parapsychogical procession I had witnessed with my own eyes. And maybe that is to be expected. Maybe parapsychologists don’t deserve funding. Maybe this state of affairs shows how well science works, and nothing has changed substantially in the way parapsychologists are treated because their findings remain stagnant. But that seems an unlikely answer. Because their findings have changed—a lot.
There are several major areas of psi research. But I’ll quickly sketch out three here. (Readers interested in exploring the research personally should consult my Notes and Sources section, which includes information on many studies, the vast majority of which were published in the past twenty years.) Let’s start with remote viewing, one of the most prominent and successful areas of psi research to emerge in the past three decades. The military conducted a lot of its own experiments to see whether remote viewing worked.The protocol the Army employed went something like this: a viewer in training is set up at a table. His supervisor gives him some minimal piece of information, like latitude and longitude coordinates, or merely tells him to focus on “the target,” without being given the foggiest clue what the target might be. The viewer is supplied with a pen and paper to record his or her presumably psychic impressions, usually in a sketch. In these trials, any written impressions produced by the viewer—in words or pictures—are given to an independent judge. The judge is also supplied with four photos, one of which displays the target. The judge, blinded to the true target, then matches the viewer’s report to the image he feels it most closely resembles, giving any viewer a 25 percent shot at scoring a hit purely by chance.
In practical applications of remote viewing, the Army simply took what information the RVer provided and looked for anything that might contain actionable intelligence. Few dispute that the Army’s remote viewers occasionally scored remarkable hits or dazzle shots along with their misses. Pat Price accurately described a military installation, including some current and past activities and even the site’s code name. Joe McMoneagle, one of the most (in)famous RVers, was asked to see the content of an airplane hangar. In this instance, he was even given a photo of the hangar’s exterior. His handlers were trying to fool him, figuring he might start drawing pictures of airplanes. Instead, he drew a tank parked inside the hangar, accurately depicting the vehicle’s interior, including laser range-finding equipment, visual systems to compensate for low-visibility conditions, and cutting-edge computers.
McMoneagle also accurately described the contents of a building on a Soviet naval base on the Baltic Sea. Military analysts initially scoffed at what he came up with—a submarine far bigger than any then known, with a set of missile tubes located, contrary to standard design, in front of the conning tower. But later, satellite photos proved him right. He had apparently described the Typhoon, a super-secret Soviet sub.
Skeptics might explain these kinds of dramatic successes as the product of basic probability laws—make enough drawings of enough targets and you’re bound to get something right. Or perhaps the details, in these particularly evocative cases, had somehow been leaked to the viewers. But this is far from the last word. The Army’s RVers didn’t just capture dazzle shots. In fact, analysis of their work suggested they were producing accurate information at a rate significantly above chance. And in one analysis, skeptics and believers came awfully close to lying down together. In fact, skeptic Ray Hyman wrote in his “Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena” that the results he saw could not, in his estimation, be put down to chance or any methodological flaw he could find. He refrained from calling psi an established fact by only the thinnest of margins—positing that some methodological flaw might be discovered in the future.
Since then, the state of play has remained much the same, and the storm of debate in psi research has often revolved around meta-analyses. A meta-analysis is, in essence, a study of studies. Take a stack of related research findings, conduct a rigorous statistical analysis, and read the numbers. Well, meta-analyses of what’s known as the Ganzfeld database tend to show evidence for the unbelievable. In Ganzfeld tests, receivers sit with halved Ping-Pong balls taped over their eyes and plugs in their ears, then try to pick up accurate information. Proponents say that cutting off the normal sensory channels allows other information to come through—like a radio antennae plucking the signal from noise.
Performing a meta-analysis on this research, one of the most well-known scientists working in parapsychology, Dean Radin, found a 32 percent hit rate when 25 percent is expected by chance. He calculated the odds against chance for the positive results at 29 quintillion to 1. But the single most promising area for further research may lie in “brain correlation” experiments.
These studies go by different names, which rigorously avoid the dreaded T word, because the mere mention of telepathy is likely to draw emotional fire from someone’s amygdala, somewhere. (Case in point: British parapsychologist Guy Lyon Playfair tells a very funny story about attempting to study psychic functioning in twins. Instead of using the word telepathy, he tried to placate the mainstream by declaring he was studying “biological correlates of empathy.”)
In most of these studies, two subjects, usually with some prior personal connection, are separated and rigged up in skullcaps designed to monitor their brain waves. While one subject, the “receiver,” sits in a bland featureless room with nothing much happening, the “sender” is exposed to stimuli. The idea is to see whether the introduction of a stimulus to the “sender” produces a corresponding reaction in the receiver’s brain. Will agitation in the sender, or for that matter pleasure, be mimicked in the brain of their partner? Dean Radin has collected thirty-three of these experiments, the majority conducted since 1994, with strongly positive results for the presence of brain correlation—which we’ll bravely call telepathy.
This is a drop in the scientific bucket, of course. When a field is really accepted, studies might more likely number in the hundreds—another sign of how psi remains ghettoized, or how far it still has to go.
There are small signs we might someday see a shift. Earlier, I mentioned that skeptics Wiseman and French had been gracious enough to admit the obvious: psi researchers have lots of good evidence. The question is whether or not they have enough. Perhaps even more incredibly, one of this country’s most vocal atheists, Sam Harris, in the End of Faith, acknowledges the research for psi is so compelling that telepathy may need to be admitted into the canon of accepted knowledge. And there is more. Along the way, I spoke to Dr. Michael Persinger, a real gadfly to paranormal believers. Persinger is in most respects a kind of happy naysayer—no to God, no to ghosts—but he also happens to be a strong proponent of psi; and he was in the process of publishing his research on what he calls “the Harribance Effect.”
Working with an under-the-radar psychic named Sean Harribance, Persinger claims to have found a pattern of brain activity that correlates with psychic functioning. “Here’s the really exciting part,” he says. “Here’s the wow. When Harribance has actually gotten correct information, his brain state corresponds demonstrably with that of the person he’s reading.”
Harribance spoke to me at length over the phone but wouldn’t agree to see me in person. “I’m not interested in publicity,” he told me, multiple times.
Clearly, something is happening here in the land of psi. And inexplicable results should be the ones that pique a scientist’s interest most. But once a subject has acquired what I call “the Paranormal Taint,” mainstream science tends to run in the other direction. As I see it, the Paranormal Taint is itself harmless, inert, and value neutral. But some people still regard the Taint either as a sign of holiness or toxicity, depending upon their point of view.
Both camps—of passionate believers and equally passionate deniers—are surpassingly small. Most of us are likely in the middle. We don’t think much about a subject like psi research from day to day, and whatever opinion we hold is provisional. In other words, we would be interested in hearing out the evidence. The problem we encounter is the same one we see in our politics: When the media investigates a phenomenon like psi, or for that matter privatizing Social Security or forming a public health care system, they reach out to sources with diametrically opposed positions. That makes for higher drama, more colorful quotes, and, so the thinking goes, better radio or television.
What it doesn’t bring us any closer to is the truth.
In Seattle, I met a woman who has been looking at the totality of psi research as dispassionately as she can, under the circumstances. Jessica Utts is a statistician from the University of California who admits she has always had an open mind about psi research. Her father had conducted some informal studies with her when she was a kid, she told me, with some success. But later on, when she delved into the world of statistics, she realized just how little such a home experiment mattered. “It wasn’t science,” she told me, “and of course there was too small a sample size. We might have just gotten lucky. But it stayed with me, as a matter of curiosity.”
Utts has since gone on to write mainstream textbooks in her field, including Seeing Through Statistics, a primer on the responsible and irresponsible uses of statistics. She is aware that numbers can be abused just like words can—to say anything we’d like. And she learned to be a skeptic.
We spoke in a large cafeteria on the university campus. Students taking summer classes sat around us, out of earshot. Utts, a matronly looking woman with big eyes, a kind demeanor and a bob haircut, sipped a soda and told me about her first public foray into the paranormal.
Someone had advanced the claim that fewer riders board trains that subsequently crash. He had conducted a statistical analysis he felt demonstrated this fact, and a TV station investigating his study called Utts to look over his handiwork. In short order, she found a crash crucial to his finding occurred on Labor Day, when the vast majority of people were off work. Once the Labor Day crash was factored out of his study, his evidence evaporated.
Eventually, Utts applied her statistical expertise to the field of psi research. She found mixed results, which nonetheless topple the current mainstream view.
According to Utts, research claiming people can influence the output of a random number generator isn’t convincing. Much of this research occurred at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, or PEAR, and Utts thinks these supposed mind–machine correlations don’t prove the ability of mind to affect matter. But remote viewing? Telepathy? She felt the body of research there was so compelling, both methodologically and statistically, that someone needed to speak up for the bedraggled community of psi researchers. And that’s how a statistician came to be one of the leading members of the Parapsychological Association.
She knew involving herself could cause her trouble at work—and she wasn’t wrong. In fact, she told me, whenever her contract comes up for renewal she faces pretty much the same scenario: the panel that decides on merit increases splits its vote because, at any given time, two or three people in her department find their skin itches when they get a load of her Paranormal Taint. Her fate hanging in the balance, her name gets kicked upstairs for a review, and . . . she gets paid. My own estimation: her mainstream credentials—those textbooks—are so strong that her credibility can’t be denied. “Statistics,” says Utts, “when you know how to read them and you have a big enough database, don’t lie. I’m as convinced as I need to be that something is going on here. How it works, I don’t know. You’d have to talk to someone else about that. But if you look at the research, the numbers are there.”
THE PHRASE “EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS require extraordinary evidence” was first coined by skeptic Marcello Truzzi, of whom we’ll hear more later. It was subsequently popularized by Carl Sagan. Regardless, the slogan is merely a pithy, modernized exaggeration of what the humanist philosopher David Hume declared roughly 250 years earlier about miracles. Hume famously argued that before we believe in a miracle, there should be so much evidence it occurred we’d be more foolish not to believe in it.
In practical terms, this makes good sense. Any claim that might require scientists to double back and reverify earlier findings or assumptions is a potential time waster. Before they begin questioning the foundation on which current research stands, they should see evidence that the ground really has shifted under their feet. The argument put forth by skeptics is that psi is an extraordinary claim; thus an extraordinary amount of data is required to support it. As skeptic Ray Hyman put it, if psi exists, “the fundamental principles that have so successfully guided the progress of science from the days of Galileo and Newton to the present time must be drastically revised.”
For the moment, without accepting or rejecting Hyman’s claim that psi undermines our understanding of physics, let’s just understand that this is the calling to which skeptics claim to respond. And so they have insisted, for decades, that parapsychologists must employ tighter and tighter controls on their studies—to eliminate obvious possibilities like fraud, and more subtle ones, like sensory leakage, in which the receiver in a telepathy study becomes aware of the target. In response, parapsychologists have increased the rigor of their methodology. But no matter what lengths they have gone to in order to satisfy the skeptics, the skeptics have yet to be satisfied. And during a period in the late 1970s and early ’80s, this back-and-forth between the skeptical community and parapsychologists was so robust that it became a subject of study all its own.
Using the conflict between skeptics and parapsychologists as a lens, sociologists began research into how science is conducted, not in its idealized form, but in reality. Sociologist Trevor Pinch subsequently identified a group of “scientific vigilantes,” people who did not always hold scientific degrees but nonetheless appointed themselves to guard the borders of “true” science.
The sociologists involved never took a side on the issue of psi itself. But in mediating the debate, they described the skeptics as an unruly and largely unscientific bunch. I recently interviewed Pinch, one of the most prolific authors on the subject, and he told me his findings surprised him. Initially he suspected the accusations leveled by skeptics were correct: parapsychologists, as they were known, were somehow self-deceived, employing shoddy controls on their experiments or committing outright fraud.
What he found was the exact opposite: psi researchers took the skeptics seriously, conducting experiments according to methodology that at least kept pace with the most rigorous of the psychological sciences. When they produced positive results, the skeptics claimed the controls needed to be tighter still. Then tighter. “It was hard not to feel bad for the parapsychologists, really,” says Pinch now. “These were qualified, sincere researchers doing serious work, and they always had to deal with this group of people that were essentially engaged in a lot of name-calling.”
Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Mayer, in her book Extraordinary Knowing, tells her own story of discovery. She started looking at parapsychological research after a psychic correctly predicted where her daughter’s lost harp could be found. She didn’t believe in psychics. She had in fact learned during her own university education that parapsychology was bunk. And so she set out on a personal mission: to prove to herself that psi is hogwash. “I began discovering mountains of research and a vast relevant literature I hadn’t known existed,” she writes. “As astonished as I was by the sheer quantity, I was equally astonished by the high caliber. Much of the research not only met but far exceeded ordinary standards of rigorous mainstream science.”
By way of comparison, she found the Skeptical Inquirer, one of the foremost skeptical journals, to read like a “fundamentalist religious tract.” Like Pinch, she had quickly reached a surprising conclusion: professional skeptics accused the parapsychologists of practicing “pseudoscience,” essentially a kind of fraud, in which psi researchers claim to be scientific but don’t employ the scientific method. They just didn’t seem able to support the charge.
The pseudoscience claim is often made of psi. But is there any data to support it? Well, in 2003, French sociologist M. C. Mousseau compared ten markers of good science with the work of parapsychologists. Her aim was to see whether psi researchers really are practicing pseudoscience.
She defined a real scientist as one who gathers or uses quantitative data, seeks empirical confirmation or disconfirmation, looks for correlations, relies on logic, proposes and tries new hypotheses, admits gaps in the current database, and is consistent with scientific work in other fields. She then reviewed the work in four “fringe” journals studying the paranormal and found them to be rigorously consistent in employing the methods of good science. In fact, when comparing the “fringe” journals to mainstream journals in physics, psychology, and optics, she found “no qualitative difference” between them. The fringe journals published fewer experiments, which she attributes to the relatively small number of practicing parapsychologists. (I saw just that, firsthand, in Seattle.) They do, however, publish a comparable amount of empirical data—and also question their own findings with an admirable openness. In fact, while parapsychologists regularly publish “null” results—studies in which no evidence of psi is found—the mainstream journals Mousseau studied published nothing but confirmatory data. In sum, then, when skeptics accuse parapsychologists of practicing pseudoscience, they are either lying; uneducated about what the parapsychologists are doing; uneducated about standard scientific practice; or, as I’m about to argue, engaged in a prolonged bout of self-deceit.
Chris Carter’s Parapsychology and the Skeptics neatly captures the history of the schism between the two camps. That said, for the purposes of this book, the situation can be assessed with a few telling war stories, many of which include James Randi. Often called the godfather of skepticism, Randi has been a fount of both entertainment and valuable lessons in critical thinking. Think of him as a loud, small, gray-haired, and angry Velma from Scooby-Doo—always eager to pull the sheet off the supposed ghost and reveal the huckster within. He has successfully debunked psychic surgeons and faith healers. But far too often, he mixes his good work with bad, undermining the movement he purports to lead.
Does telepathy exist? Randi would say there is no valid evidence for it. But the truth is far more complicated. There is in fact good evidence to suggest psi is real. But as yet, there is no scientific consensus. What the ongoing furor over psi demonstrates, however, is that even rationalists can come to look like believers—motivated less by the data in front of them than by the worldviews closest to their hearts.
The foundation for the modern skeptical movement was laid by CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP was founded by humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz in 1976, when Kurtz asked fellow skeptic Marcello Truzzi to join him as co-chairman. Truzzi published his own privately circulated newsletter at the time, The Zetetic, which served as a forum for skeptics and proponents of anomalous phenomena to engage in an ongoing dialogue. In contrast, Kurtz’s own publication, The Humanist, seemed too shrill by half—tossing religious claims and well-controlled psi experiments into the same large dust bin. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Truzzi was removed as editor of the group’s new publication and left CSICOP shortly after joining it, convinced the board was more interested in promoting a polemical agenda than engaging in real inquiry.
Over the years, though he remained a skeptic, Truzzi thought the researchers turning up positive data for psi were on the whole ethical and practicing science. But “the problem with CSICOP is that it has made debunking more important than impartial inquiry,” he later wrote. He even began using the term pseudoskeptics to describe the attitude of the worst offenders on CSICOP’s board.
Things might have quieted down with Truzzi gone. But the internal purging grew bloodier. Dennis Rawlins, an astronomer enlisted into CSICOP, was the next to find his head on the chopping block. In a 1981 Fate magazine essay, Rawlins portrayed CSICOP as a gang of fanatics. And according to Rawlins’s article, they began revealing themselves behind the scenes, in 1975, as CSICOP was forming.
The controversy started when prominent French psychologists Michel and Francoise Gauquelin presented evidence for what they dubbed the “Mars effect,” which claimed a disproportionate number of European sports champions had been born with Mars rising in their astrological signs. Kurtz published a pair of damning essays on the subject in the Humanist, which mishandled some of the statistical fine points along the way. The Gauquelins, in turn, threatened legal action.
Kurtz struck a deal with the neo-astrologers. Their data would be submitted for a new analysis under terms agreeable to both parties. Whatever the result, Kurtz would publish the findings. According to Rawlins, he warned Kurtz that the terms of the new test would probably still yield evidence for a Mars effect. But Kurtz blew him off. And the new analysis, just as Rawlins feared, turned out in favor of the neo-astrologers. Rawlins felt not the least bit convinced the Mars effect was real. (There was an anomaly, he felt, in the sample the statistics were based on.) But he did feel a rationalist organization should keep the agreements it makes.
Kurtz?
Not so much.
According to Rawlins, Kurtz and CSICOP engaged in a massive cover-up of the study to which they had agreed. They didn’t publish the findings for two years, and when they did the result was a kind of statistical hash—attempting to explain away the Gauquelins’ apparent success. Stunned, Rawlins went into overdrive, alerting other key members of CSICOP. But he found that the organization was being steered along a strictly political path: His objections were based in sound science; problem was, sound science just didn’t make CSICOP look good.
Rawlins felt pressured to keep quiet, and Kurtz was in a panic over Rawlins’s dissent. “I’ll do anything to avoid trouble,” he said, according to Rawlins.
Even more telling, when Rawlins confronted James Randi, he asked him why all the chicanery was in order. Why not simply print the study everyone agreed to and move on?
Writes Rawlins, “The reply was ever the same: We can’t let the mystics rejoice.”
This isn’t even a remotely scientific motivation, and it reveals the extent to which CSICOP was more devoted to spreading a worldview, like religious leaders, than practicing scientific methods. Randi even spoke to Rawlins in language that likened CSICOP to a cult. “Drink the Kool-Aid, Dennis,” Rawlins says he chided him, referring to the Jonestown, Guyana, “massacre” in 1978, in which nine hundred cult members killed themselves by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid.
After Rawlins forced this debacle to a head, the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal voted to discontinue any further scientific investigations. From that point forward, they have been literally just a debunking and propaganda society. But their methods, and their unofficial mantra—We can’t let the mystics rejoice—too often seem to describe the modern skeptical movement. For decades, in fact, the CSICOP crowd has been the public face of skepticism—names like Philip Klass, James McGaha, and of course James Randi popping up on our TV screens whenever something needs explaining.
The trouble for those of us who come in contact with a paranormal claim in the media is that this overzealous gang of self-proclaimed rationalists dominates one-half of the conversation. They are usually contextualized as the people who coldly appraise the data. But the skeptic, too, comes in bearing a bias that can render her or him just as untrustworthy as any street-corner psychic. In fact, in the wake of Rawlins’s charges, other analyses appeared that backed up his account. The most damning was that of another former CSICOP fellow, Richard Kammann, who argued that the same psychological dynamic that accounts for irrational belief was operating in the skeptics by his side: “A process of subjective validation took over,” he writes, “which I have outlined in The Psychology of the Psychic to account for the existence of false beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. The model says that once a belief or expectation is found, especially one that resolves uncomfortable uncertainty, it biases the observer to notice new information that confirms the belief, and to discount evidence to the contrary. This self-perpetuating mechanism consolidates the original error and builds up an overconfidence in which the arguments of opponents are seen as too fragmentary to undo the adopted belief.”
Right out of the gate, it seems, the skeptical movement had run into the barriers inside their own heads. And don’t worry, we’ll get to the psychics a bit later on that very same score. But for now, I want to travel a bit deeper into the skeptical rabbit hole.
In the early 1970s the famous Israeli magician-cum-paranormalist Uri Geller was winning frenzied headlines. He made numerous media appearances, seemingly bending spoons with the power of his mind and perceiving information at a distance. Subsequent research into his abilities conducted and filmed at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) yielded mixed results. He could not bend spoons under controlled conditions. He did score far above chance in remote viewing experiments. James Randi subsequently investigated, and in his 1982 book Flim-Flam!, he argues that films made of the Geller experiments were not shot, as had been claimed, by famous Life war photographer Zev Pressman. The films credit Pressman as cameraman without his knowledge or permission, claimed Randi. Even more alarming, Pressman supposedly told others at SRI that the successful Geller tests were conducted after he had gone home for the day. In sum, writes Randi, “[Pressman] knew nothing about most of what appeared under his name, and he disagreed with the part that he did know about”—namely, that Geller displayed any psychic functioning at all.
These would have been damning facts—if they were true. Pressman’s own account was subsequently captured by writer Guy Lyon Playfair: “The ‘revelations’ [Randi] attributes to me are pure fiction.” According to writer Jonathan Margolis, Pressman maintained that the videos were authentic throughout his life. Randi further quotes a physicist named Arthur Hebard accusing the SRI scientists of lying about positive results of paranormal experiments he himself had witnessed. But, well, he also denied Randi’s statements. He told Paul H. Smith, the remote viewing Texan I met when I first arrived in Seattle, that he never would have accused anyone of lying. (Smith further explains that Hebard’s account of what happened at the experiment better matches the parapsychologists’ report than it does Randi’s.) We are left, then, not only questioning Geller but also his chief critic. Randi, however, is far from the only skeptic whose motivations require investigation.
Susan Blackmore is something of a lioness in skeptical circles, a prize not only because she writes with grace and wit but because of her compelling autobiography. Dear Susan, it seems, was once one of them—a paranormalist. She has claimed she wanted to be a “famous parapsychologist.” And in her essay, “The Elusive Open Mind: Ten Years of Negative Research in Parapsychology,” she writes convincingly of her frustrating inability to demonstrate a psi effect. By her own account, her failed experiments convinced her that the skeptics were right: psi is the ghost in the machine—and no, ghosts don’t exist either.
That really is a compelling autobiography. But her tale is not without its problems. For starters, researcher Rick E. Berger went looking through Blackmore’s work and found the ten years of research she claimed in her article was actually conducted in just two or three years. Further, when her entire body of research was taken into account, she had found a demonstrable psi effect, with odds against chance of 20,000 to 1. Berger found that Blackmore had thrown out her own positive studies, ostensibly for shoddy methodology, but kept her negative results even when they demonstrated the same control problems.
To be clear, Berger and Blackmore both contend her work was so poorly designed as to be worthless in drawing a conclusion about the existence of psi (Blackmore differs with him on several of his other criticisms, too). But I do think we gain great psychological insight into the believer/skeptic dynamic by considering just what in hell Blackmore must have been thinking all these years. Why would she disregard her own positive results? Why wouldn’t she simply improve her controls and keep working?
There may be a clue in her desire to be “famous.” I met no stars in Seattle. I was one of a small handful of people in attendance without a direct professional connection to the field. Many of the presentations were attended by just two dozen people. By contrast, Randi’s annual Amazing Meeting, the kind of skeptic’s fest at which Blackmore is a regular, draws a huge crowd of bloggers, writers, and podcasters—and their fans. The July 2010 Amazing Meeting drew more than one thousand people, roughly ten times the number that attended the Parapsychological Association’s tepid fête. The woman who wanted to be a famous parapsychologist may simply have found the going too hard, the prospects of becoming famous too remote. In a 1995 Skeptical Inquirer article she states, “I am skeptical because believing in psi does not get me anywhere.” She goes on to argue that believing in psi doesn’t help her understand the universe or other mysteries, but I wonder: cognitive psychologists operate on the premise that the behaviors we engage in, the beliefs we hold, all provide some kind of payoff—be it financial, physical, or emotional. From this point of view, Blackmore’s famous conversion to skepticism may simply have offered her the payoffs she desired. Skepticism got her to where she wanted to be.
Richard Wiseman is another skeptical luminary. He goes out of his way, at times, to be fair—admitting some success in psi research, for instance. But he has also been accused of distorting the subject. In the episode I find most intriguing, he followed up on research conducted by Harvard-educated historian and biochemist Rupert Sheldrake. The topic was, of all things, a dog. Sheldrake had recently conducted experiments in which a dog, Jaytee, seemed to know precisely when its owner would be coming home. Again and again, in randomized experiments, just after its owner started back to the house, the dog would stop whatever it was doing and go sit by the window. Wiseman subsequently conducted a smaller series of trials with Jaytee. His data proved almost identical to Sheldrake’s. Yet he went on to make the argument that his own findings disproved the biochemist’s claims. He admitted the statistical similarity of their findings recently, when cornered by Alex Tsakiris on his Skeptiko podcast.
On a personal level, I relate to Wiseman. I have a hard time believing in psychic pooches and would like to see more evidence. (My own dog always sat in the same spot right before I came home from school, too; so hey, who knows?) That said, I think that distorting the data that does exist is counterproductive. And the lesson is that, in addition to being wary of supposedly psychic dogs, we should also be skeptical of skeptics.
CSICOP changed its name in 2006, to CSI—the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. They publicly claimed they liked the new name’s brevity. But it also seems that, by dropping the word science from their name, they gain a freer hand to put forth a materialist philosophy without the bother of employing the scientific method. They also captured the aura of the many TV shows airing under that banner that purport to uncover the truth through scientific inquiry. (Ironically, every major felony trail I cover as a reporter includes some warning from the prosecutor that CSI is fiction, and such a high level of scientific evidence doesn’t exist in the real world of criminal court proceedings. So maybe the skeptics’ invocation of a show broadcasting an unrealistic view is spot on.) Randi remains listed as a fellow. But today he is probably most famous for running the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), and his promotional vehicle—the Paranormal Challenge. For roughly forty years, Randi has offered to pay anyone who can prove a paranormal claim. He still has the money, now more than a million dollars.And to many of his admirers in the skeptical community this is clear proof that the paranormal must not exist. But the Paranormal Challenge, too, is more sideshow than science.
For starters, the testing protocols Randi agrees to require evidence far beyond what a scientist would demand to admit a significant positive result.
Brian Josephson, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist with whom this chapter started, has noted the case of a Russian girl with a supposed gift for diagnosing medical illnesses. She agreed to the challenge and went 4 for 7 in her testing—a remarkable hit rate. Yet she was deemed a failure because the protocol demanded she get five correct.
“The case of the Russian girl was unfortunate,” admits Chris French, perhaps the most level-headed skeptic on the scene. “The skeptics came off looking rather bad there. Her results were remarkable enough that they should have said, ‘Well, whatever the protocol, we should take another look at her.’ ”
The problem is that French is speaking as a reasonable man who believes the girl would have failed by a wider, less disputable margin in a second go. Randi isn’t operating from that kind of mindset. He even involved himself in the Jaytee research, claiming, among other things, that the JREF had investigated dog telepathy and found it to be false. Sheldrake said he then asked for copies of Randi’s research but was told any records were informal and now, um, gone. Not exactly science.
In 2005, University of Arizona parapsychologist Gary Schwartz claimed that Randi asked him to submit his raw data, which demonstrated a psi effect, for an independent analysis. According to Schwartz, Randi listed psi-sympathetic researcher Stanley Krippner as one of the four reviewers he had lined up. But when Schwartz tried to verify Krippner’s participation directly, Krippner told him the opposite: he had refused Randi’s request to serve on the independent review board.
It seems to me that any truly rational group would not have James Randi as a member. But there is something very revealing in the Randi saga: that the little magician has been allowed to behave this way by fellow professional skeptics and the crowd of rationalists that follow their work is a testament to one thing only: our common humanity. Skeptics, after all, are believers, too. But believing in the power of science isn’t actually doing science. The scientific method is itself impartial—but it is no antidote for the very human frailty of ignoring the information we don’t like and embracing the information we do.
Gallup polls in 2001 and 2005 show paranormal belief has generally trended up in recent years, even as Randi has been casting spells for rational thinking. And a recent article in Current Research in Social Psychology, titled “Social Influences on Paranormal Belief,” found that when participants were told mainstream science rejects a claim, they became more likely to accept the claim as true! “This finding ran counter to our expectations,” write the authors, “but is consistent with findings that trust in science is decreasing.”
Randi and the skeptics make a living posing as the figures who protect us all from irrationality and unreason. But they don’t seem to have done the job. And there is nothing at all scientific and even less that is reasonable about distorting or ignoring data. Besides, when it comes to telepathy, the skeptics seem particularly extreme—because what they have been “protecting” us from, all these years, is in fact laughably small.
PERHAPS THE MOST TELLING presentation at the Seattle conference occurred near the end.
Charles Tart, an academic psychologist, received a career achievement award. He walked up to the podium to speak, smiling. But it seemed a number of members preferred he not show up at all. Tart’s latest book, The End of Materialism, is titled in a way seemingly designed to piss off the skeptics. But in Seattle he seemed bent on pissing off his colleagues in parapsychology, too—and for the very same reasons.
A long, lean, boyish, and playful kid in his early seventies, Tart chuckled his way through a talk that had his colleagues shifting uncomfortably in their seats. “We believe in God,” he told them. “The skeptics have found us out, and we can’t fool ’em so we might as well admit it.”
Tart intended this as a laugh line, and in a sense it worked. He laughed. But the fact, and he knows it, is that modern parapsychologists don’t fit his description. Less than a third of the respondents to my recasting of the Allison survey, for instance, “agreed strongly” with the statement, “The results of parapsychological research clearly indicate that there is a nonmaterial basis of life or thought.”
Fewer than a quarter strongly agreed with the statement, “Consciousness continues in some form, after death, and includes memory and the retention of a sense of self.”
Parapsychologists are so utterly not New Age adherents that Tart, with his deep and abiding interest in human spirituality, is a kind of walking oxymoron: an honored pariah among his own people. “I think I’m tolerated,” he told me later. The takeaway from Tart’s performance was, for me, simply how broadly and how dramatically the public has been lied to. The paranormal is heaped into one great manure pile. But the parapsychologists I met in Seattle not only can’t be equated with the philosophers of the New Age, they seem deeply suspicious of anyone who brings up questions of spirituality at all.
I think this might be because parapsychologists are discussing a very small tear in the accepted model of the fabric of reality—one that could possibly admit all manner of New Age hoo ha, but then again might not. Theoretically, if psi exists, we cannot possibly know how much its existence will change our view of the world until we understand the mechanism by which it works. In other words, psi might not be so extraordinary a claim after all.
Want some evidence for that?
Well, for one thing, from a practical perspective, psi has little impact. What parapsychologists have found is that evidence of psi is only elicited over a vast number of trials, and even then it’s best seen statistically. Run the Ganzfeld or a remote viewing test over hundreds of trials and the hit rate finally reaches what is known as “statistical significance,” when chance seems a far less likely explanation than psi. In simpler terms, that might mean a 32 percent hit rate, when guessing would yield the correct answer 25 percent of the time. Over enough trials, even a 2 or 3 percent margin reaches statistical significance. And viewed in purely statistical terms, the evidence for psi is robust. One of the most compelling studies I’ve seen demonstrated that once enough trials are conducted, the presence of some form of mental telepathy pops out more convincingly than the evidence supporting the use of aspirin for heart attack. But that doesn’t mean we can all stroll out to the nearest street corner psychic or big-ticket professional like Allison DuBois. In fact, it means just the opposite. Psychic functioning is too unreliable to be commodified or counted upon—if it exists, it really is the ghost in the machine, the phenomenon that only makes itself known at the margins.
And so this begs a question: if psychic functioning is real, but seemingly not a practical factor in our day-to-day lives, is that really such an extraordinary claim? Isn’t psi rejected so hotly mostly because of its long-running connection to mysticism, its considerable buildup of Paranormal Taint? I asked the skeptic, French, the same question—with a bit more humor. “Look,” I asked, “if the research indicates some small psi effect today, and rockets take off according to the laws of Newtonian physics today, if we simply admit this telepathy research into the canon—won’t a rocket still take off tomorrow?”
French immediately chuckled. “Yes, yes,” he said.
“Then how radical an idea is it, really?” I continued. “I mean, we won’t necessarily have to rewrite the laws of physics, but more likely amend them. Isn’t this usual skeptical argument, that acknowledging telepathy will force us to rewrite the laws of physics, simply a kind of reverse superstition? A kind of hysteria?”
“Yes, well,” he said, chuckling louder still. “I think you might be on to something there.”
IN MY OWN CURIOSITY on this topic, I have consulted a few psychics over the years. And two experiences stand out.
In the first one, I see a sign for a fortuneteller on a street in midtown New York. This isn’t, of course, the kind of high-end psychic we see on TV who charges hundreds of dollars an hour for a private consultation. But it is the kind of psychic we personally encounter most frequently, and I want to see what she is all about. So I walk inside, happy in summer to have found an air-conditioned room. The supposed psychic points me to a seat and sits down herself. She is young, so young in fact that I wonder how she is supposed to pick up deep, hidden information about my life when she probably at this stage knows so very little about her own. But no matter, this roughly eighteen-year-old girl of indeterminate Middle Eastern origin, asks for and receives ten of my dollars. Now she stares deeply into my eyes.
“What is your name?” she asks.
I had hoped she might predict it, so we’re off to a bit of a rocky start. “Steven,” I tell her.
“Steven,” she says. “Steven, Steven, Steven!”
She closes her eyes and reaches for my hand across the small table between us, expertly avoiding the crystal ball.
“Steven, give me your left hand, Steven!” she says.
I give her my left hand and she clutches it in both of hers, opening her eyes again and staring at me intently. “Steven,” she says, manipulating the fingers of my ringless left hand between her palms and closing her eyes again.
“You are not married!” she says.
She exclaims this as if this is psychic information, though she no doubt gained it from the sense of . . . touch. She opens her eyes again.
“Would you like to be?” she asks.
“Sure,” I say.
Her eyes snap shut again. “Steven! Steven! I see love coming for you!” she says. “But Steven our time is up. For ten dollars more, I can tell you about this love I see.”
This is a classic scam. Executed quickly and inartfully. And if I had proven particularly gullible, this short grifting exercise might even have turned into a long con. Disreputable psychics will tell the most vulnerable clients they are under some sort of curse—then offer to remove it for a fee.
For me, however, the experience that pushed me away from psychics was more personal than this—and it came in the past year.
Doreen Molloy is very different than the street corner psychic I saw in New York. Molloy has been vetted in double- and triple-blind readings by the Windbridge Institute, a research group that has focused on mediumship. In these trials, Molloy proved remarkably successful and attained the enigmatic status of a Windbridge certified “Level Five Medium.” I found this a bit funny, but it also intrigued me. The idea of a so-called expert medium underscored the difference between the science of parapsychology conducted by someone like Dean Radin and the performance of a psychic, who purports to be the one delivering accurate information as a professional. The imperatives are entirely different. Someone like Radin, testing psychic ability in the general population, can afford to be happy about a small but statistically significant result. Someone like Molloy needs to deliver, well, a bit of razzle-dazzle to keep customers coming back.
I took a few minutes before the call to write down the names of five people I’ve lost, including my oldest brother, my brother-in-law, my mother, and two friends who had died, far too young, in the previous year. I scanned over their names, feeling silly about it, but still hoping Molloy might be real, the afterlife might exist, and one or more of them might come through.
The first half-hour was entirely unremarkable, not really any different than any other reading I’ve had. She supplied such a wide variety of information that I could have applied it, or not applied it, to any number of people. This was remarkably frustrating, especially because early on she mentioned that an older woman, who died of cancer, had stepped forward. This woman was so weak at the end that dying was a relief.
Surely, this could have been my mother. The problem is that it also could have been millions of other mothers—and to make matters worse, Molloy had nothing with which to follow it up, nothing that was specific only to my mother. When I asked her for something I could use as confirmation, she asked if my mother was a musician or had a career in music.
“No,” I said.
And Molloy had nothing more to give. In fact, she suggested I ask my father, who is still alive, if maybe my mother had some deeper interest or expertise in music than I had been aware. As if I didn’t know my own mother, her overly sentimental taste in music and her off-key warbling whenever I heard it.
To be fair, there was one point at which Molloy went on something of a tear: I will not mention the name of the friend she seemed to be describing. He was an avowed atheist and materialist, and in this funny world we live in, his wife might find it insulting to his memory if I publicly suggested he might still be alive. In any event, Molloy claimed another spirit was coming through and immediately scored a number of hits: “There is someone to your side,” she said. “He wants to thank you. You said something for him, on his behalf, after he died, and he was very impressed. And grateful. He wants you to know he was honored. And he’s also telling me he was honored . . . multiple times? There was more than one ceremony for him?”
She had my attention. This was all true.
“He was surprised today. You asked for him, right? He was surprised by that and honored by that.”
I had. His was one of the five names I had written down. And I felt somehow odd doing it. We had never really been close, never socialized. But I always felt we were somehow brothers. And I deeply admired and respected this man. When he died, I asked to be included among the speakers. I even stayed up till 3:00 A.M. the night before, working for several hours to find the right thing to say.
“I’m getting that he died of cancer,” she said. “It caused him problems with his digestion, and was rare. And he was very, very weak at the end and ready to go.”
Yes. True as well.
“He was a writer? I’m getting that he was a writer and he is still proud of that, over there on the other side. He’s saying ‘I really was a good writer.’ . . . I like this guy! I’m getting a lot of energy from him!”
I allowed myself one question: “Is there anything he is surprised by?”
“Over there?” she asked “Or over here?”
“Well, the question I intended was over there,” I said. “But I’ll listen to whatever.”
“He’s laughing,” she reported. “He says you’ve got him! He was a big skeptic? A nonbeliever who thought, like, ‘You die and that’s the end?’ ”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, he was quite surprised,” she said. “But he’s glad with how it’s all turned out.”
In this entire section of the reading, which went on just a little longer, I took notes and reviewed them later. She did get a couple of details wrong. She said, for instance, that he fondly remembered a road trip with a specific friend. But I checked with the friend, who remembered no road trip at all. After reviewing my notes, I spent an hour on the Internet, trying to see if there was some way she might have connected myself, this deceased writer, and the fact that I spoke at one of his memorials. There had been no news accounts. Was there some reference to that event floating around on someone’s blog?
I found nothing. And I think, to a real believer, this was it. Not just a dazzle shot, but confirmation. A conversation with someone who died, conducted through the intercession of a medium. To a skeptic, this was all just a bunch of crap—a run of lucky guesses that turned out to be right just by coincidence. And me? When I look at Molloy’s performance in its totality, I am wholly unimpressed. Still, I think the following exercise is helpful. I think the most flattering claim that might be made for Molloy is that she might have heard from my friend. You can apply whatever percentage you like to that “might,” from .0001 percent to 99 percent. It doesn’t matter to me because all those numbers feel the same: rawly painful.
Might is a painful state of affairs for all of us, whether we are believers or skeptics. Might causes anxiety. And as a result, uncertainty is not the option we normally choose.
Instead, we choose a side:
Doreen Molloy connected me to my friend.
Or
Doreen Molloy was just guessing.
I think, in the end, when it comes to the broader picture of psi, what we have learned is more complicated than that. What we have learned is that believers and skeptics both have findings to support their cause. The believers have reams of research data suggesting some form of psi appears to be at work. But the skeptics can argue that fools and their money are soon parted—the purported psi effect so weak we can’t count on it to produce accurate information on any practical basis.
And that’s the stunner: even if psi is real, there isn’t anything to do with it—at least not as the matter stands right now. The Army discontinued its remote viewing experiments because psi couldn’t be operationalized to provide consistently actionable intelligence. For several years, Sony had a lab devoted to psi research that closed because they couldn’t turn it into a product.
The science is clear: if psi exists, the most reliable way to see it is through the lens of statistics. As a result, believers should stop and think before ever consulting a psychic. But toward the end of this book, we’ll find more reason to take heart. Because there is a better way to feel as if we’ve communicated with someone who’s died. And for the people who experience that sense of connection, there is no better way to get through the night.