The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [80]
Why don’t scientists accept psi? Daryl Bem has a stellar reputation as a rigorous experimentalist and he has presented us with statistically significant results. Aren’t scientists supposed to be open to changing their minds when presented with new data and evidence? The reason for skepticism is that we need both replicable data and a viable theory, both of which are missing in psi research.
Data. Both the meta-analysis and ganzfeld techniques have been challenged by scientists. Ray Hyman from the University of Oregon found inconsistencies in the experimental procedures used in different ganzfeld experiments, which were lumped together in Bem’s meta-analysis as if they used the same procedures. He argued the statistical test employed (Stouffer’s Z) was inappropriate for such a diverse data set, and he also found flaws in the target randomization process (the sequence the visual targets were sent to the receiver), resulting in a target selection bias. “All of the significant hitting was done on the second or later appearance of a target. If we examined the guesses against just the first occurrences of targets, the result is consistent with chance.”14 Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman conducted a meta-analysis of thirty more ganzfeld experiments and found no evidence for psi, concluding that psi data are nonreplicable.15 Bem countered with ten additional ganzfeld experiments he claims are significant, and he has additional research he plans to publish.16 And so it goes … with more to come in the data debate. In general, over the course of a century of research on psi, the tighter the controls on the experimental conditions the weaker the psi effects seem to become until they disappear entirely.
Theory. The deeper reason scientists remain skeptical of psi—and will even if more significant data are published—is that there is no explanatory theory for how psi works. Until psi proponents can explain how thoughts generated by neurons in the sender’s brain can pass through the skull and into the brain of the receiver, skepticism is the appropriate response. If the evidence shows that there is such a phenomenon as psi that needs explaining (and I am not convinced that the evidence does support such a conclusion), then we still need a causal mechanism.
Quantum Consciousness
One plausible theory of just such a causal mechanism has been proffered by the American physician Stuart Hameroff and the British physicist Roger Penrose in both technical writings17 and a popular film improbably titled What the #$*! Do We Know?!18 The film version is artfully edited and features actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer trying to make sense of an apparently senseless universe. The film’s central tenet is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum mechanics. I met the producers of the film the weekend it opened when we were both on a Portland, Oregon, television show, so I got an early screening. I never imagined that a film grounded in an esoteric branch of physics—quantum mechanics—would succeed in the crowded market of popular movies, but it has grossed millions and created a cult following.
The film’s avatars are scientists with strong New Age leanings, whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as “quantum flapdoodle.”19 University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, proclaims with great profundity: “The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies.” It might prove an interesting experimental test of his theory for Goswami to leap out of a twenty-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground’s tendencies.
The work of Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto, author of The Hidden Messages of Water, is featured to show how thoughts change the structure of ice crystals—beautiful crystals form in a glass of water with the word “love” taped