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

"All people frequently take advantage of subtle cues," explains Joe Nickell, a former stage magician and private investigator, and editor at the Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine devoted to debunking the paranormal and pseudoscience. What many of us call intuition may simply be a finely tuned antenna, decoding subtle signals. Many psychics have perfected that ability, as well as a few less-than-respectable techniques.

"During a first, cold reading, many psychics begin by stating the few facts they already know or by offering generalities. They closely monitor their clients' reactions--eye movements, facial expressions, any noticeable response--and take their cue from those signals.

Psychics often speak in a stream-of-consciousness style, piling on impressions. According to one 1982 study, when the abilities of psychic sleuths who worked with detectives were tested against college students and homicide detectives, none of the three groups scored better than they would have if left to chance, but the psychics produced 10 times as much information, increasing their likelihood of a chance hit.

Psychics tend to shift away from their errors in midstream. For example, one reader asked me, "Were you recently married? No? Do you know anybody going through a divorce? No? Well one of your friends is going to divorce in the future and they'll need you to be a buffer."

Psychics are adept at reinterpreting their pronouncements after the fact. This is called retrofitting. For instance, they will come up with numbers supposedly related to a specific crime, and later say those numbers qualify as accurate hits when they correspond to anything from the birthday of a suspect's friend to a significant date, time of day, or telephone number.

Saved by Science

Why are we seeing a sudden surge of interest in the paranormal, especially now, in this so-called age of science? Is it a kind of backlash? "Paradise has been lost, not to sin but to science," contends Stuart Kaufmann, Ph.D., a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute and pioneer in the field of complexity. In his book, At Home in the Universe, Kaufmann delineates the ways science has shattered our sense of importance. First came Copernicus, who proved that we were not the center of the universe; then came Newton, who proved that gravity, not God, made the arrow arc towards its target; and the final blow was struck by Darwin, who, says Kaufmann, showed us that we are merely "the result of a chain of accidental mutations, sifted by a law no more noble than survival of the fittest."

In the words of Roger Watsh, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and philosophy at the University of California at Irvine, "Science enlarged the scope of our known universe from leagues to light years, but paradoxically we ended up as meaningless blobs of protoplasm adrift on a little speck of dust in some uncharted galaxy. In response to this we're seeing areal thirst for direct spiritual experience." Toss. a little millennial fever into the brew and, says Walsh, you've got more and more people turning to psychics, moving back to magical views of reality.

Psychics themselves recognize the power of science, and many casually borrow its language. In the course of my readings, I heard statements like, 'I'm picking up some chronic illness in your DNA,' or 'I go into the chemical, metabolic, and electromagnetic fields of a person to access privileged information.' To the scientists who are actually studying the paranormal, these statements are infuriating. "If those psychics were pressed to explain what they mean, you would discover they don't know what they're talking about," complains Dean Radin, Ph.D., director of the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada.

At laboratories like Radin's, along with the pioneering Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (PEAR), founded by rocket engineer Robert Jahn, Ph.D., in 1979, psychic ability is studied in carefully designed and repeatable studies. These scientists have staked out a narrow and mesmerizing band of reality where science and the "mystical" begin to merge.

"When the history of consciousness in the twentieth century is written," contends Dr. Dossey, "it will be the studies at these laboratories that mark the turning point." It is in these labs, at this moment, that science may actually be demonstrating that consciousness is nonlocal; that is, it's not limited to specific points in space or time--or even to the brain itself.

And so it was, paradoxically, the scientists who rescued me from my withering faith. Scientists themselves are apparently encouraged of late because of a new form of statistical analysis called meta-analysis. Using computers, researchers can compare and sift out masses of data from a vast archive of different studies.

Two of the most robust areas of scientific research are telepathy and telekinesis (mind over matter). In the first, a "sender" tries to connect with a "receiver," though they are isolated from each other. The sender may look at a "target" (a visual image) randomly selected by the researchers, while a receiver in another room tries to identify or describe that target. Or a sender may try to alternately calm and excite a receiver at random intervals, simply via his thoughts and own state of being; the receiver's skin conductance and galvanic skin response (indications of arousal) are measured. Studies repeatedly demonstrate significant results.