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Parapsychology
ESP and Data
The science media casually dismisses ESP without looking at the research.
Posted January 30, 2014
We are, as a culture, in a constant state of conflict, usually framed in religious terms: believers and unbelievers; or religion versus science. Over the years, for anyone involved in the media, including myself, the advantage has gone, increasingly, to science, yet fundamental aspects of spiritual experience are better validated now, precisely because science has had its say: Meditation is an obvious case in point, with research revealing huge health benefits.
What intrigues me most, however, as time goes on, is that the data also offers far more support than might be expected for a significantly more “out there” idea, though the mainstream science media seems ignorant of this.
A prime example was posted last week at National Geographic online. The story, “ESP Is Put to the Test—Can You Foretell the Results?” is a light debunking exercise, meant to disabuse us all of any notion that we can attain information through a “sixth sense.”
The idea that we can gather accurate information through some means other than our five senses is a long running debate. And, according to several polls on the subject, most people believe we sometimes do just that—becoming aware of some true thing by, well, means unknown.
The Nat Geo article claims the scientific evidence cuts sharply against ESP and cites some studies on the subject. But the piece is rife with problems that, I think, actually validate further studies on the subject of ESP.
For one thing, the first study author Susan Brink mentions isn’t even about ESP. As one critic of Brink’s article already wrote: “The paper doesn't mention ESP, the reported study wasn't a test of ESP, and the references in the article don't cite any articles that are even tangentially relevant to ESP. It had nothing whatsoever to do with ESP.” (The study actually deals with visual perception, specifically becoming aware of any changes in a scene.)
The second study Brink writes about, however, is more illuminating. Back in 2011, Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem set off a tidal wave of controversy with a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “Does precognition exist? Can we ‘feel’ the future?”
Bem’s paper claimed that people can sometimes pick up on accurate information from the future, and suggested some sort of mechanism might be found in the world of quantum mechanics. His study included nine experiments involving 1,000 subjects.
The experiment that received the most intense coverage included a risqué touch. Subjects sat in front of a computer screen displaying two curtains. The administrator explained that one curtain covered nothing at all; the other shielded an erotic image from view. The subjects’ job was to guess which curtain blocked a picture. Obviously, the study subjects had a 50-50 shot of being right. But subjects correctly located the pornographic images 53.1 percent of the time, a rate significantly above chance. Even curioser, Bem consistently found corresponding physiological changes, indicating arousal, two or three seconds prior to the revelation of an erotic image.
The upshot, suggested Bem, is that we have some capacity to glean this more charged information, perhaps as an evolutionary development, even without any sensory data to help us along.
In another experiment, Bem’s study subjects completed a memorization test. They were shown a series of words, quickly, then asked to write down as many of them as they could remember.
Bem then had a computer randomly choose half of the words the students had originally been shown. Even though the test was already over, the students were then required to write down the words the computer selected.
In memorization exercises, reading words and writing them down is considered a standard, effective means of study. So what Bem was doing, slyly, was having students study right after a test as opposed to before. Incredibly, when he analyzed the data, Bem found that students had better recall of the words they’d studied after the test was over.
What gives?
Bem’s take is that some sensory data seems to leak backward, from the future to the present. As might be expected, Bem’s data and his interpretation of it guaranteed him intense criticism and scrutiny. The Nat Geo article summarizes what has happened since as a rout: “So far, other researchers have been unable to reproduce Bem's results,” writes Brink, linking to a post by skeptic Sharon Hill at Doubtful News.
The error Brink makes is that, well, the truth is actually completely opposite of what she wrote. In fact, there have been several successful replications of Bem’s experiments. Further, there are also studies begun prior to Bem’s publication that support his thesis. In one such paper, participants did better, right out of the gate, at tasks they practiced later.
Of course, it is tempting to just dismiss all of this stuff out of hand. And I’d expect, for hardcore materialists and skeptics, who look at these subjects as fronts in a culture war between science and religion, these studies appear downright harmful. After all, don’t Bem’s findings offer succor to believers of all manner of New Age hokum?
But the solution here is not to join hands in a round of New Age koombaya—or to retreat into a dogmatic skepticism in which the dominant paradigm must be protected against any contradictory data that flickers into view. In fact, I’d argue, the answer is to lean more heavily on science and the data at hand. (The entire debate around telepathy is trickier than might be expected, with arguments centering mostly, these days, around how to analyze the statistics involved.)
Bem, his supporters, and his critics are in the process of doing real science. There are studies that failed to replicate Bem’s results. And there are studies that succeeded. Some meta-analyses, sifting through all the data, are supposedly underway, to try and make sense of these conflicting findings. I suspect, however, that this more measured, nuanced and—dare I say—accurate rendering of where we are now is unlikely to appear in many venues outside this column.
The greater portion of the mainstream science media has seemingly made up its mind, even though the data suggests we wait. Just look for reporting on the succesful replications of Bem's work. And keep looking. And looking. Conversely, the negative results got wide coverage.
It is of course true that magazines and journalists such as myself sometimes get things wrong for reasons having nothing to do with bias. But in this specific instance, I think Nat Geo messed this up so badly, actually writing that there have been no successful replications when in fact there have been many, precisely because of a deep and abiding prejudice against any subject associated with the word “paranormal.” I suspect they never took a serious look for positive replications because no one involved in writing or publishing Brink’s piece thinks positive replications are even possible.
My own takeaway from all of this is that an idea like ESP remains deeply imbedded in our culture—a concept that appears in the stories we tell on screen and, if the polls are to be believed, in private, in tales shared among friends and loved ones. The data suggests there is some reason to believe these stories are based in truth. But the answer remains unsettled. This is a state of affairs many among us find hard to live with—or even acknowledge. But, if we really do value reason, if we really do value the data science has yielded, we need to accept just where we are at the moment—and not simply espouse the idea we expect or wish to be true.
