The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [79]
Fifth, the confirmation bias may be at work here. In a 2005 special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted to “Sheldrake and His Critics,” I rated the fourteen open-peer commentaries on Sheldrake’s target article (on the sense of being stared at) on a scale of 1 to 5 (critical, mildly critical, neutral, mildly supportive, supportive). Without exception, the 1s, 2s, and 3s were all traditional scientists from mainstream institutions, whereas the 4s and 5s were all affiliated with fringe and pro-paranormal institutions.11 Sheldrake responded that skeptics dampen the morphic field’s subtle power, whereas believers enhance it. Of Wiseman, Sheldrake remarked: “Perhaps his negative expectations consciously or unconsciously influenced the way he looked at the subjects.”12 Perhaps, but how can we tell the difference between negative psi and non-psi? The invisible and the nonexistent look the same.
ESP and Evidence of Mind
For more than a century there have been a number of serious scientists who believed that such epiphenomena were not the products of our tendency to infuse patterns with intentional agents and supernatural forces. They strongly suspected that the brain was tapping into genuine forces not yet measurable through the traditional tools of science. In the late nineteenth century, organizations such as the Society for Psychical Research were founded to employ rigorous scientific methods in the study of psi, and many world-class scientists supported their efforts. In the twentieth century, psi periodically found its way into serious academic research programs, from Joseph Rhine’s Duke University experiments in the 1920s to Daryl Bem’s Cornell University research in the 1990s. Let’s look at this most recent claim of experimental proof more closely, as it is the best argument to date for extrasensory perception.
In January 1994, Bem and his University of Edinburgh parapsychologist colleague Charles Honorton published a paper in the prestigious review journal Psychological Bulletin entitled “Does Psi Exist? Replicable Evidence for an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer.” Conducting a meta-analysis of forty published experiments, the authors concluded: “The replication rates and effect sizes achieved by one particular experimental method, the ganzfeld procedure, are now sufficient to warrant bringing this body of data to the attention of the wider psychological community.” A meta-analysis is a statistical technique that combines the results from many studies to look for an overall effect, even if the results from the individual studies were not significant (that is, they were unable to reject the null hypothesis at the 95 percent confidence level). The ganzfeld procedure places the “receiver” in a sensory isolation room with Ping-Pong ball halves covering the eyes, headphones playing white noise over the ears, and the “sender” in another room psychically transmitting photographic or video images.
Despite finding evidence for psi—subjects had a hit rate of 35 percent when 25 percent was expected by chance—Bem and Honorton lamented: “Most academic psychologists do not yet accept the existence of psi, anomalous processes of information or energy transfer (such as telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception) that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms.”13