Do the spirits move you?

Focuses on the growing enchantment of Americans with all things paranormal. Psychic readings; Role of science in the sudden surge of interest in the paranormal; Research on mind over matter. INSET: I was a psychic spy.

By Jill Neimark, published on September 01, 1996

Two of the eight seemed to hit the bull's-eye several times. One was Mary Jo McCabe, a New Orleans clairvoyant and author of Learn to See, a book about developing your own intuitive ability I'd had a reading from her a few months earlier on the phone. In her previous reading, she'd correctly predicted the amount of money I'd be offered for a job (she was proved right the following week). In my "test" reading of her, she saw that in September of 1994 I'd moved, and that the move was very hard for me (both true). She also saw bookends coming together in 1993-the year my first novel was published. When l asked her what our senior editor had been doing in September of 1995, she saw "a roomful of furniture covered with sheets and all of a sudden he's taking off the sheets. He has a new placement in life." As it turns out, he had also moved into a new home then. "There were no sheets on the furniture," he said, "but my wife and I spent most of October unpacking." Ever the joking nonbeliever, he added, "Maybe the previous family kept sheets on their furniture."

Another reader, Carolyn Myss, a "medical intuitive," has worked closely with Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D., a Missouri physician and founding president of the American Holistic Medical Association, and Christiane Northrop, M.D., a Maine doctor specializing in women's health. Both physicians have referred patients to Myss for readings that confirmed their own, independent medical diagnoses. Myss diagnosed me by phone, correctly identifying portions of my medical history'. While Myss didn't get the whole picture, she seemed to genuinely "see" things.

It seems that even the best readers are like radio stations in a lightning storm, picking up an occasional signal perfectly, yet transmitting a lot of static as well. Dr. Dossey--who early in his career had experienced three detailed precognitive dreams but who has not had one since--respects those rare, perfect signals for the questions they make us ask about space and time: "In my case, it was like, 'Dossey here's the message: Time is not linear. You got it?' Yup, I've got it."

The Illogic of Belief

Yet our capacity for credulity is large, and too often we see clothes the Emperor isn't wearing. Ray Hyman, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Oregon, and perhaps the field's most relentless debunker of all things psychic, worked as a palm reader when he was a college student, and was deeply convinced of its accuracy Then, at a friend's suggestion, he started telling clients the opposite of what he "saw" in their palms. They were as enthusiastic as those who'd come before, and Hyman was sufficiently shaken to switch his major from journalism to psychology "My specialty is human error," he says today

The tendency for people to agree with what they've been told at readings has been dubbed the Barnum effect, in honor of P. T. Barnum's line, "There's a sucker born every minute." A legendary test of the Barnum effect was offered in Pans in the 1970s, by Michel Gauquelin, who placed an ad offering free personal horoscopes. Later, 94 percent of the recipients rated their horoscope accurate. Each person had received the same horoscope, that of one of France's most notorious mass murderers.

The Barnum effect is heightened incredibly in one-on-one readings, simply because of the way most psychics approach them. Many offer a kind of messianic authority that both elevates and deflates the listener, and that may veer from warmly embracing to hostile-an all-knowing blend of mother's milk and a slap in the face.

When I began responding to what one visionary was saying to me, she cut me off: "I don't like any help in someone's file, so butt out." Another said my father was very protective; when I disagreed, she retorted, "You don't know your father. You've never known your father." When a world-renowned seer told me I wanted to move west, I assured him that I had tried that the year before and discovered I was deeply attached to New York. I never wanted to leave again. He replied, "That's your head talking. Your heart wants to move."

I suspect it's this psychic hubris that catapults some readers to fame. This isn't as benign as it may sound. "I've known my share of psychic casualties," Mark Matousek wrote in a controversial Common Boundary magazine article entitled "Painting Devils." "A few years ago," he wrote, "an otherwise brilliant, politically active liberal I know actually followed his psychic teacher's brainstorm to buy Krugerrands while apartheid was still being practiced in South Africa. Someone else was told by a psychic that he was about to embark on the most important love affair of his life, then had his bones jumped by that same wacko."

What is really at work in a psychic reading? Why do some of the psychics get it right some of the time? And why do "ordinary" folks sometimes come up with uncannily accurate predictions themselves? After a thoroughly disappointing session with a tarot card reader, I traded tarot card readings with the art director at this magazine. We don't know each other well, but I was able to tell her that she'd recently given the boot to two men in her life, which she had actually done the week before; and she was able to describe my emotional state as accurately as I could have myself.