ST. JOSEPH OF COPERTINO

 MERLIN-CLASS MAGICIANS

In a way, we are magicians. We are alchemists, sorcerers and wizards. We are a very strange bunch. But there is great fun in being a wizard.

—BILLY JOEL

Here we’ll consider three real-world examples of magical power far beyond anything that we typically see in the laboratory. All three of these individuals were observed to do mind-blowing things by dozens to thousands of multiple, credible witnesses. Evidence based on eyewitness testimony can never be as certain as measurements taken in controlled experiments, and there is always the problem that history embellishes a good story. But as you’ll see, there are persuasive reasons to pay attention to the documented evidence in these cases. Each involved many witnesses over long periods of time. In such instances the mundane explanations boil down to mass hallucinations, collusion, or blatant fraud. My take on these individuals is that they probably had genuine talents.

ST. JOSEPH OF COPERTINO

The first case is Joseph Desa, born in Copertino, Italy, in 1603. Like most ordinary people in the seventeenth century, Joseph was poor and born during a time of widespread poverty, plague, hunger, and war. The Catholic Church was the principal authority among European nations, and its power was enforced with an iron hand in the form of the Inquisition. The general population was constantly on the edge of desperation, quickly inflamed by rumors, and easily spooked. It was a time when the mass mind vacillated between moments of panic, dismay, and fanaticism.

Within this context, when Joseph was nine years old he fell ill from an infection, which led to gangrene. It crippled him for five years, much of it spent bedridden and in pain. Without access to the Internet (Wi-Fi would not arrive for another four hundred years) or even a book, Joseph escaped the prison and pain of his body through daydreams, reveries, and fantasies. In some of those states he was spontaneously transported into states of ineffable bliss.

Finally, a hermit with a reputation as a surgeon operated on the boy, and Joseph encountered his first miracle: he survived the surgery. But without schooling and stunted in social skills, Joseph was perceived as dimwitted. He easily fell into trances and gained the nickname “Boccaperta” (Gaping Mouth) for his tendency to look up with his mouth open when entranced by Church music. Hired and fired from many workaday jobs, he felt attracted to the contemplative life of the Church. After a harrowing series of failures and near misses, he was ordained when he was twenty-five years old.

The Church suited Joseph, but his special talents soon became a problem. Early in his career, if a member of the town displeased him, there were consequences. For example:

A certain Count don Cosimo Pinelli had an ongoing sexual liaison with the daughter of Martha Rodia; Joseph said that if the count didn’t desist from his amours, he would go blind. This turned out to be what happened, and Joseph bragged about his prediction, but later restored the man’s sight, this time getting him to leave the girl alone and pay reparations to the family! Before long nobody in Copertino dared enter the company of the friar unless their conscience was squeaky-clean; otherwise they shrank in terror from the gaze of the black-bearded friar.1Fortunately, Joseph’s tendencies toward becoming Lord Voldemort were suppressed.2 But as he grew older his abilities became stronger, more frequent, and more difficult to hide. He gained a reputation as a prophet and a miracle healer, and he exhibited telepathy, precognition, the odor of sanctity, power over animals and natural forces, and—the icing on the cake—when giving Mass he spontaneously levitated, not just once but hundreds of times in front of many startled congregations.3 This became a big problem, because living miracle-makers threatened to deflect the public’s attention away from Church authority. And that was strictly forbidden.

Church officials kept moving Joseph from town to town and tried to keep him away from people by prohibiting him from doing priestly duties. The strategy didn’t work. Besides hordes of ordinary people wanting to witness his feats, stories about him began to attract nobles, clergy, and royalty. And that in turn led to unwanted attention from the Inquisition. While on trial by the Inquisition in Rome, Joseph was ordered to say Mass in public to see if the rumors about him were true.

They were. He lifted off the ground in the presence of the inquisitors.

You can imagine how freaked out they must have been. But Joseph experienced another miracle that day. He was just given a stern warning to stop all this levitating nonsense, and somehow he escaped being burnt as a witch. But his abilities were not completely under his control and continued to persist, attracting more and more attention, until a second encounter with the Inquisition put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. Still, given his history, he was extremely fortunate, for this was during the peak years of the witch-burning craze.

A century after his death Joseph was canonized by Pope Benedict XIV as St. Joseph. Pope Benedict, born Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini, had previously served as the Church’s Advocatus Diaboli, or “Devil’s Advocate.” This position was charged with arguing why a person nominated for sainthood was not worthy of that position. Any suggestion of fraud, exaggeration, or collusion regarding miracles attributed to the nominee was thoroughly examined. The materials amassed in the case of Joseph amounted to thirteen volumes housed in the Vatican Archives (they are still there today). They include the Inquisition’s trial records, biographies written over the years, diaries, letters, and official Church documents from the different cities and convents Joseph lived in or visited.

Joseph lived for sixteen years at Grotella Convent near Copertino, one of the longest stretches he spent in one location. During that time it was documented that he levitated at least seventy times in front of multiple witnesses. I’ll give just one example of the kinds of documented reports involving Joseph’s levitations:

April 30, 1639: After stepping inside the Church, Giuseppe [St. Joseph] glanced at a painting of the Holy Virgin located in the vault above the wooden frieze of the altar of the Immaculate Conception, a Madonna painted with the Baby Jesus in her arms in a way that strikingly resembled the Madonna of the Grotella [convent where Joseph had spent many years]. At the sight of her, Padre Giuseppe gave a huge scream and flew about thirty meters in the air and, embracing her, said, “Ah, Mamma mia! You have followed me!” It all happened so quickly that those present were filled with sacred terror, marveling to each other, and remaining in a stupor over the Padre’s performance.4For many more details about St. Joseph, I recommend philosopher Michael Grosso’s 2016 book, The Man Who Could Fly. Grosso reviewed the evidence for Joseph’s abilities and compared his case with similar instances of miraculous behavior recorded throughout history. Grosso concluded that Joseph was for real, basing his judgment on the written historical record: thirty-five years of multiple eyewitness testimonies from ordinary people as well as popes, cardinals, ambassadors, dukes, and kings from all over Europe. And that was just the formal written testimonies. An untold number of congregants, probably numbering in the thousands, had also witnessed Joseph’s abilities.5

DANIEL DUNGLAS HOME

Two centuries after St. Joseph, Daniel Dunglas Home was born near Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1833. He was one of eight children of Elizabeth McNeill, a descendant of a Scottish Highland family said to have the gift of “second sight.” Today we’d call that gift clairvoyance, or remote viewing.

Unless you’ve read about the history of psychic phenomena, you may never have heard of Home (it’s pronounced “hume”). But his psychic feats—including levitation—were just as prodigious and in some ways even more startling than St. Joseph’s.

The case of Home is especially interesting because his abilities were subjected to scientific tests. The testimony of Home’s abilities is also better than St. Joseph’s because the former’s performances were extensively covered in the newspapers of the day, and they were repeatedly observed by the most accomplished illusionists and conjurers (stage magicians) of the day, who naturally assumed he was cheating.

When he was nine years old, Home was adopted by his aunt and her husband and they emigrated to America, landing in a town near Norwich, Connecticut. Like St. Joseph, Home was an unusually sensitive child. As an infant he was so weak he wasn’t expected to survive, and he had a lifelong highly nervous temperament. Also like St. Joseph, the “feats Home performed were so extraordinary that when witnesses described what they had seen, they were dismissed as foolish, even insane.”6 That quote is from a 2005 biography of Home by University of Edinburgh historian Peter Lamont, entitled The First Psychic. The title of Lamont’s book refers to the first time that the word psychic was used in the popular press to describe someone with Home’s abilities.

Lamont’s book is especially useful in assessing Home’s feats because Lamont is a historian of psychology, an experienced illusionist, and a member of the Inner Magic Circle, a special branch of the London-based organization for magicians called the Magic Circle. One becomes a member of the Inner Magic Circle by invitation only, based on proven expertise and other significant contributions to the art of conjuring. Being a member of that fraternity, Lamont naturally regarded Home with a practiced, skeptical eye. But despite a strong inclination to regard magic solely in terms of tricks and illusions, that’s not what Lamont concluded about Home. He was just as puzzled as everyone else:

What are we to make of Daniel Dunglas Home? It is true that there were many accusations of fraud, but most of them were entirely without base, and actual evidence for fraud was both rare and inconclusive. He might have been a cheat, but if he was, then he cheated successfully for two decades, before hundreds of witnesses in thousands of séances. Many of the witnesses were hostile to spiritualism, and many remained unconvinced by what they had seen, yet time and again they admitted that they were unable to explain what had happened.7

The best conjurers of the day tried, and failed, to explain Home’s feats. Scientists investigating Home, including one of the most prominent chemists and physicists of the day, Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), reported evidence in support of Home’s claims. Crookes’s critics were reduced to making ad hominem attacks and misrepresenting the nature of his research.8

The phenomena produced by Home were in the context of a rising cultural interest in spiritualism, especially in the form of physical mediumship. These performances involved speaking to spirits via rapping sounds, levitating tables, invisible spirits playing musical instruments, sitters at the séances being touched by spirits, and so on. Many of these séances were conducted in rooms that were completely dark, or dimly lit by candles or gaslight. Demand for such performances was high, and because of supply and demand, many mediums were only too happy to perform séances for tidy sums. Many of them were subsequently unmasked as frauds.

It was in this context that Home was performing his séances throughout Europe, both for secular and scientific people highly skeptical of the claimed phenomena and for spiritually inclined people sympathetic to it.

Lamont’s book provides a full accounting of the kinds of phenomena associated with Home and the settings of his performances. To give a flavor of that history, I’ll recount one episode involving a group of highly skeptical Dutch rationalists who were openly hostile to spiritualism. They were members of the Dutch Radical School of Modern Protestantism, which virulently denied all biblical miracles, miraculous divine intervention, and the concepts of spirits. Like other skeptics, they had loudly dismissed Home’s claims without having seen them. But Home wasn’t intimidated by skepticism, so he agreed to perform a series of séances for them.

Home arrived in the Netherlands on January 31, 1858. The following day he conducted a séance for Queen Sophie of the Netherlands. A few days later in a hotel in Amsterdam, Home held a séance for ten of the Dutch rationalists, none of whom he had previously met. The group included a doctor of philosophy, a physician, a lawyer, an optician, and a Dr. Gunst, who reported the setup:

[The skeptics] sat round a large mahogany table, which they examined sufficiently to note that the top, column and base were “directly and immovably fixed” together….On top of the table were four [bronze] candelabras, with two more below, which “made it possible to obtain an undisturbed view of what was happening under the table.”9

The group placed their fingertips on the table in plain view, and Home told them that if they wished to remove their hands they could do so. They tested themselves to make sure they weren’t being manipulated by suggestion, were allowed to talk freely among themselves, and “laughed mockingly concerning the matter at hand.”10Within this context one would not expect much to happen. But then:

These expressions stopped soon enough. For as they mocked, “the table started to make a sliding movement,” and those towards whom it was moving “were requested to try to stop this movement; this, however, they could not do.” When the table stopped, raps began, and when raps were requested “in a certain manner, and as many times as we should indicate, [t]his wish was carried out to the full.” As Daniels’ skeptical witnesses watched in characteristic disbelief, the table “started to rise up on one side…so high that all of us were very much afraid that [the candelabras] would fall off.”11

Two more séances were held with this group, with increasingly inexplicable phenomena. Dr. Gunst later reviewed the normal interpretations that critics had offered as an explanation for Home’s effects. The first was that Home was using some sort of conjuring trick or gimmick. This was dismissed because, according to Dr. Gunst, the “Amsterdam séance room was well illuminated all the time the sittings lasted. Furthermore, the skeptical observers were crowded around Home (the performer) and not restricted in any movement or observation they desired to make.”12

The second explanation, that the table movements were due to unconscious motor movements by the sitters, was dismissed because the séance table was large and sturdy enough to seat fourteen people, and besides the thickness of the wood it had a very heavy central column. Despite the weight of the table, it was observed by multiple witnesses to levitate at least twelve inches off the floor.

The third explanation, regarding faked “spirit hands” touching the sitters, was deemed insufficient because the séance room was well lighted, so they were able to keep Home under constant surveillance and the sitters were still touched in quick succession, as they had requested, with one person being correctly touched after making requests mentally.

The fourth explanation, hallucination, was dismissed because, unlike claims that Home could perform only in front of “believers” who might be inclined to imagine things, these séances were conducted for a group of avowed skeptics, none of whom Home knew.

Other common interpretations, such as Home deflecting attention while using his feet to perform the trick, were excluded because the skeptics could easily see under the table and noted that Home had not moved. Still other objections asserted that the room must have been prepared by confederates in advance, using hidden wires and gimmicks. That too could be ruled out because “the séances were conducted in a hotel where Home had never been before and where he arrived only a few hours before the commencement of the first sitting.”13

Dr. Gunst concluded that strange things really had happened but could not be explained. He added, “And nothing could be observed that could give rise to even the slightest suspicion that Mr. Home was acting in a fraudulent manner.”14 This was consistent throughout Home’s career. No one ever brought forth evidence of fraud, nor was there any evidence that the effects were due to hallucination. In sum, Home, like St. Joseph, remains a genuine mystery.

So far we’ve discussed people who lived centuries ago. In such cases, even with excellent documentation it’s difficult to know with any certainty what happened back then. What about a modern Merlin?

Dean Radin

Real Magic 

Seeing psi

It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.

—John Tyndall (1820-1893)

Given the substantial historical, anecdotal, and experimental evidence for psi, why do some intelligent people positively bristle at the mere suggestion that the evidence for psi be taken seriously? After all, scientists studying psi simply claim that every so often they find interesting evidence for strange sorts of perceptual and energetic anomalies. They’re not demanding that we also believe aliens have infiltrated the staff of the White House. Still, some people continue to insist that “there’s not a shred of evidence” for psi. Why can’t they see that there are thousands of shreds that, after we combine the weft of experiences and the warp of experiments, weave an immense, enchanting fabric?

The answer is contained in the odd fact that we do not perceive the world as it is, but as we wish it to be.1 We know this through decades of conventional research in perception, cognition, decision making, intuitive judgment, and memory. Essentially, we construct mental models of a world that reflect our expectations, biases, and desires, a world that is comfortable for our egos, that does not threaten our beliefs, and that is consistent, stable, and coherent.

In other words, our minds are “story generators” that create mental simulations of what is really out there. These models inevitably perpetuate distortions, because what we perceive is influenced by the hidden persuasions of ideas, memory, motivation, and expectations. An overview of how we know this helps clarify why we should be skeptical of both overly enthusiastic claims of psychic experiences and overly enthusiastic skeptical criticisms, and why controversy over the existence of psi has persisted in spite of a century of accumulating scientific evidence.

The bottom line is that if we do not expect to see psi, we won’t. And be cause our world will not include it, we will reach the perfectly logical conclusion that it does not exist. Therefore anyone who claims that it does is just stupid, illogical, or irrational. Of course, the opposite is also true. If we expect to see psi everywhere, then our world will be saturated with psychic phenomena. Just as uncritical skepticism can turn into paranoia and cynicism, uncritical belief can turn into an obsessive preoccupation with omens, signs, and coincidences. Neither extreme is a particularly balanced or well-integrated way of dealing with life’s uncertainties.

Four Stages Redux

This book opened with a listing of the four stages by which we accept new ideas. In Stage 1 the idea is flat-out impossible. By Stage 2 it is possible, but weak and uninteresting. In Stage 3 the idea is important, and the effects are strong and pervasive. In Stage 4 everyone thinks that he or she thought of it first. Later, no one remembers how contentious the whole affair was.

These same four stages are closely associated with shifts in perception and expectation. In Stage 1, expectations based on prior convictions prevent us from seeing what is out there. At this stage, because “it” can’t be seen, then of course “it” is impossible. Any evidence to the contrary must be flawed, even if no flaw can be specified. The stronger our expectation, the stronger our conviction is that we are correct.

In Stage 2, after our expectations have been tweaked by repeated exposure to new experiences or to overwhelming evidence, we may begin to see “it,” but only weakly, sporadically, and with strong distortions. At this stage, we sense that something interesting is going on, but because it not well understood, we can’t perceive it clearly. Authorities declare that it may not amount to much, but whatever it is, it might be prudent to take it seriously.

In Stage 3, after someone shows how it must be there after all, either through a new theoretical development or through the unveiling of an obvious, practical application, then suddenly the idea and its implications are obvious. Moreover, if the idea is truly important, it will seem to become omnipresent. After this stage, all sorts of new unconscious tactics come into play, like retrocognitive memory distortion (revisionist history), and a whole new set of expectations arises. Inevitably, mental scaffolding begins to take shape that blocks perception of future new ideas. History shows that this cycle is repeated over and over again.

Effects of Prior Convictions

A classic experiment by psychologists J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman demonstrated that sometimes what we see—or think we see—is not really there.2 Bruner and Postman created a deck of normal playing cards, except that some of the suit symbols were color-reversed. For example, the queen of diamonds had black-colored diamonds instead of red. The special cards were shuffled into an ordinary deck, and then as they were displayed one at a time, people were asked to identify them as fast as possible. The cards were first shown very briefly, too fast to identify them accurately. Then the display time was lengthened until all the cards could be identified. The amazing thing is that while all the cards were eventually identified with great confidence, no one noticed that there was anything out of the ordinary in the deck.

People saw a black four of hearts as either a four of spades or as a normal four of hearts with red hearts. In other words, their expectations about what playing cards should look like determined what they actually saw. When the researchers increased the amount of time that the cards were displayed, some people eventually began to notice that something was amiss, but they did not know exactly what was wrong. One person, while directly gazing at a red six of spades, said, “That’s the six of spades but there’s something wrong with it—the black spade has a red border.”3As the display time increased even more, people became more confused and hesitant. Eventually, most people saw what was before their eyes. But even when the cards were displayed for forty times the length of time needed to recognize normal playing cards, about 10 percent of the color-re versed playing cards were never correctly identified by any of the people!

The mental discomfort associated with seeing something that does not match our expectations is reflected in the exasperation of one participant in the experiment who, while looking at the cards, reported, “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure what a spade looks like. My God!”

Studies like this in the 1950s led psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues at Stanford University to develop the idea of cognitive dissonance.4 This is the uncomfortable feeling that develops when people are confronted by “things that shouldn’t ought to be, but are.” If the dissonance is sufficiently strong, and is not reduced in some way, the uncomfortable feeling will grow, and that feeling can develop into anger, fear, and even hostility. A pathological example of unresolved cognitive dissonance is represented by people who blow up abortion clinics in the name of Jesus. Also, to avoid unpleasant cognitive dissonance people will often react to evidence that disconfirms their beliefs by actually strengthening their original beliefs and creating rationalizations for the disconfirming evidence.

The drive to avoid cognitive dissonance is especially strong when the belief has led to public commitment. Because the primary debunkers of psi phenomena are publicly committed to their views through their affiliation with skeptics organizations, we can better understand some of the tactics they have used to reduce their cognitive dissonance.

Reducing Cognitive Dissonance

There are three common strategies for reducing cognitive dissonance. One way is to adopt what others believe. Parents often see this change in their children when they begin school. Children rapidly conform to groupthink, and after a few years, they need this particular pair of shoes, and that particular haircut, and this video game, or they will simply die. Children are not just imagining their strong needs for this or that fad. Even in young children, the need to conform to social pressure can be as painful as physical pain. Likewise, a college student faced with trying to please a skeptical professor will soon come to agree that anyone who believes in all that “New Age bunk,” or psi, is either mentally unstable or stupid.

A second way of dealing with cognitive dissonance is to apply pressure to people who hold different ideas. This explains why mavericks are often shunned by more conventional scientists and why there is almost no public funding of psi research. In totalitarian regimes, the heretics are simply tracked down and eliminated. To function without the annoying pain of cognitive dissonance, groups will use almost any means to achieve consensus.

The third way of reducing cognitive dissonance is to make the person who holds a different opinion significantly different from oneself. This is where disparaging labels like “heretic” and “pseudoscientist” come from. The heretic is stupid, malicious, foolish, sloppy, or evil, so his opinion does not matter. Or she has suspicious motives, or she believes in weird practices, or she looks different. The distressing history of how heretics were treated in the Middle Ages and the more recent “ethnic cleansings” of the last half-century remind us that witch-hunts are always just below the veneer of civility. The human psyche fears change and is always struggling to maintain the status quo.5 Vigorous struggles to promote the “one right” interpretation of the world have existed as long as human beings have held opinions. As history advances, and we forget the cost in human suffering, old controversies begin to look ridiculous. For example, an explosive controversy in the Middle Ages was whether God the Father and God the Son had the same nature or merely a similar nature. Hundreds died over that debate.6Cognitive Dissonance and PSI

When we are publicly committed to a belief, it is disturbing even to consider that any evidence contradicting our position may be true—because public ridicule adds to the unpleasantness of cognitive dissonance. This is one reason that the psi controversy has persisted for so long. It also helps to explain why it is much easier to be a skeptic than it is to be a researcher investigating unusual effects. Skeptics may be overly conservative, but if they are ultimately proved wrong they can just smile and shrug it off and say “Whoops, I guess I was wrong. Sorry!” By contrast, frontier scientists are often blindly attacked as though their findings represented a virus that must be extinguished from the existing “body” of knowledge at all costs.

Commitment stirs the fires of cognitive dissonance and makes it progressively more difficult to even casually entertain alternative hypotheses. This is as true for proponents as it is for skeptics. Cognitive dissonance is also one of the main reasons that many scientists dismiss the evidence provided by psi experiments without even examining it. In science, said the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, “novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation. Initially only the anticipated and usual are experienced even under circumstances where an anomaly is later to be observed.”7This means that in the initial stages of a new discovery, when a scientific anomaly is first claimed, it literally cannot be seen by everyone. We have to change our expectations in order to see it. When one scientist claims to see something unusual, another scientist who is intrigued by the claim, but does not believe it yet, will simply fail to see the same effect.

Kuhn illustrated this bewildering state of affairs with the case of Sir William Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus. Uranus was observed at least seventeen times by different astronomers from 1690 to 1781. None of the observations made any sense if the object was a star, which was the prevailing assumption about most lights in the sky at the time, until Herschel suggested that the “star” might have been in a planetary orbit. Then it suddenly made sense. After this shift in perception, caused by a new way of thinking about old observations, suddenly everyone was seeing planets.8The same was true for studies of subliminal perception in the 1950s. Not all early experimenters could get results. No theory could account for the bizarre claim that something could be seen without being aware that it was being seen. But once computer-inspired information-processing models were developed, with their accompanying metaphors about information being processed simultaneously at different levels, then suddenly subliminal processing was acceptable and the effects were observable.9The effect of shifting perceptions was observed more recently when high-temperature superconductors were unexpectedly discovered in 1986. Soon afterward, superconducting temperatures previously considered flatly impossible were being reported regularly. The same had occurred with lasers. It took decades to get the first lasers to work; then suddenly every thing was “lasing.” It took decades to get the first crude holographs to work, and now they are put on cereal boxes by the millions. Some of these changes were the result of advancements in understanding the basic phenomenon, but those advancements could not occur until expectations about what was possible had already changed.

Another famous and poignant example is the case of German meteorologist Alfred Wegener. In 1915 Wegener published a “ludicrous” theory that the earth’s continents had once been a single, contiguous piece. Over mil lions of years, he claimed, the single continent split into several pieces, which then drifted apart into their current configuration. Wegener’s theory, dubbed “continental drift,” was supported by an extensive amount of care fully cataloged geological evidence. Still, his British and American colleagues laughed and called the idea impossible, and Wegener died an intellectual outcast in 1930. Today, every schoolchild is taught his theory, and by simply taking the time to examine a world map, we can now observe that Wegener’s impossible theory is entirely self-evident.10Expectancy Effects

I know I’m not seeing things as they are, I’m seeing things as I am.

—Laurel Lee

In attempting to understand how intelligent scientists could seriously propose criticisms of psi research that were blatantly invalid, sociologist Harry Collins showed that for controversial scientific topics where the mere existence of a phenomenon has been in question, scientific criticisms are al most completely determined by critics’ prior expectations. That is, criticisms are often unrelated to the actual results of experiments. For example, Collins showed that in the case of the search for gravity waves (hypothetical forces that “carry” gravity), reviewers’ assessment of the competency of experiments conducted by proponents and critics depended entirely on the reviewers’ expectations of what effects they thought should have been observed.11The expectancy effect has also been observed in experimental studies by Stanford University social psychologists Lee Ross and Mark Lepper. They found that precisely the same experimental evidence shown to a group of reviewers tended to polarize them according to their initial positions.12 Studies conforming to the reviewers’ preconceptions were seen as better designed, as more valid, and as reaching more adequate conclusions. Studies not conforming to prior expectations were seen as flawed, invalid, and reaching inadequate conclusions. Sound familiar?

This “perseverance effect” has been a major stumbling block for parapsychology. Collins and sociologist Trevor Pinch studied how conventional scientists have reacted to claims of experimental evidence for psi phenomena. In an article they wrote that focused on issues of social psychology, and in which they explicitly stated that their own position was entirely neutral with regard to the existence of psi, they received

a spleenful letter from a well known professional magician-and-sceptic which attempts to persuade us to change our attitude to research in the paranormal and claims that: “Seriously, how men of science such as yourselves can make excuses for … [the proponents’] incompetence is a matter of astonishment to me. … I was shocked at your paper; I had expected science rather than selective reporting.”13

Reviewer bias is not just evident in skeptics’ reviews of psi research; it is endemic in all scientific controversies. This is especially true for controversies concerned with questions about morality or mortality. For example, science becomes muddled with politics when we seek answers to difficult questions such as whether herbal remedies should be used to treat cancer, or whether nuclear power is safe, or whether a particular concentration of benzene or asbestos in the workplace is tolerable.

A reviewer’s judgment of a researcher’s level of competency is often established on the basis of who produced the results rather than on independent assessments of the experimental methods. For example, results reported by “prominent professors at Princeton University” will be viewed as more credible than identical results reported by a junior staff member at “East Central Southwestern Community College.”

Ultimately, it seems that scientific “truth,” at least for controversial topics, is not determined as much by experiment, or replication, or any other method listed in the textbooks, as by purely nonscientific factors. These include rhetoric, ad hominem attack, institutional politics, and battles over limited funding. In short, scientists are human. Assuming that scientists act rationally when faced with intellectual or economic pressures is a mistake.

Sociologist Harry Collins calls one element of this problem about getting to the “truth” of controversial matters the experimenters’ regress. This is an exasperating catch-22 that occurs when the correct outcome of an experiment is unknown. To settle the question under normal circumstances, where results are predicted by well-accepted theory, the outcome of a single experiment can be examined to see if it matches the expectation. If it does, the experiment was obviously correct. If not, it wasn’t.

In cases like parapsychology, to know whether the experiment was well performed, we first need to know whether psi exists. But to know whether psi exists, we need to run the right experiment. But to run the right experiment, we need a well-accepted theory. But … And so on. This forms an infinite, potentially unbreakable loop. In particular, this loop can continue unresolved in spite of the application of strict scientific methods. In an at tempt to break the experimenters’ regress, skeptics often argue that the phenomenon does not exist. Of course, to do that they must rely on invalid, nonscientific criticisms, because there is plenty of empirical evidence to the contrary.

It is difficult to detect purely rhetorical tactics unless one is deeply familiar with both sides of a debate. As Collins put it:

Without deep and active involvement in controversy, and/or a degree of philosophical self-consciousness about the social process of science (still very unusual outside a small group of academics) the critic may not notice how far scientific practice strays from the text book model of science.14

Judgment Errors

The acts of perception and cognition, which seem to be immediate and self-evident, involve absorbing huge amounts of meaningless sensory information and mentally constructing a stable and coherent model of the world. Mismatches between the world as it really is and our mental “virtual” world lead to persistent, predictable errors in judgment. These judgment errors have directly affected the scientific controversy about psi.

When a panel of expert clinicians, say psychologists, physicians, or psychiatrists, are asked to provide their best opinions about a group of patients, they are usually confident that their assessments will be accurate. After all, highly regarded clinicians have years of experience making complex judgments. They believe that their experiences in judging thousands of earlier cases have honed their intuitive abilities into a state of rarefied precision that no simple, automated procedure could ever match. They’re often wrong.

Psychologist Dale Griffin of Stanford University reviewed the research on how we make intuitive judgments for the same National Research Council report that reviewed the evidence on psi.15 Griffin’s job was to remind the committee that when we make expert judgments on complex is sues, it is important to use objective methods (like meta-analysis) to assess the evidence rather than to rely on personal intuitions. It’s too bad that the committee did not pay close attention to Griffin’s advice.

Starting in the 1950s, researchers began to study how expert intuition compared with predictions based on simpleminded mathematical rules. In such studies, a clinical panel was presented with personal information such as personality scores and tallies on various other tests, then asked to predict the likely outcomes for each person. The prediction might be for a medical assessment, or suitability for a job, or any number of other applications. The judges’ predictions were compared to a simple combination of scores from the various tests, and both predictions were compared with the actual out comes. To the dismay of the experts, not only were the mathematical predictions far superior to the experts’ intuitions, but many of these studies showed that the amount of professional training and experience of the judges was not even vaguely related to their accuracy! To add insult to in jury, the mathematical models were not highly sophisticated. In most cases, they were formed by simply adding up values from various test scores.16A flurry of studies in the 1950s confirmed that simple mathematical pre dictions were almost always better than expert clinical intuition for diagnosing medical symptoms such as brain damage, categorizing psychiatric patients, and predicting success in college. Clinical experts were not amused.

Today, when we evaluate complex evidence provided by a body of experimental data, we use the successor to those early mathematical models: the quantitative meta-analysis. So the National Research Council experts who relied on their personal opinions to evaluate the evidence for parapsychology, however intuitively appealing their opinions may have felt, would be as perplexed as the clinical experts of the 1950s to discover that their subjective opinions were just plain wrong.

What Do We Pay Attention To?

How could experts be so wrong? One reason is that expectation biases are self-generating. We cannot pay attention to everything equally, so instead we rely on past experience and vague mental “heuristics,” or guidelines, that worked fairly well on similar problems. Unfortunately, relying on subjective impressions and mental guidelines creates a cycle in which our past experience begins to divert us from paying attention to new things that might be even more predictive. After a while, since we no longer pay attention to anything other than what we have already decided is important, we tend to keep confirming what we already knew. This model-or theory-driven approach is called the confirmation bias.

The problem with the confirmation bias is that we end up learning only one or two ways to solve a problem, and then we keep reapplying that solution to all other problems, whether it is appropriate or not. This is especially compounded for highly experienced people, because past successes have made their theories so strong that they tend to overlook easier, simpler, more accurate, and more efficient ways of solving the problem. This is one reason that younger scientists are usually responsible for the giant, earth-shaking discoveries—they haven’t learned their craft so well that they have become blind to new possibilities. Younger scientists are invariably more open to psi than older scientists.

One well-known consequence of being driven by theory is the “self-fulfilling prophecy”—the way our private theories cause others to act toward us just as our theories predict. For instance, if our theory says that people are basically kind and loving, and we expect that people will act this way, then sure enough, they will usually respond in kind, loving ways, reinforcing our original expectation. In contrast, if we assume that people are basically nasty and paranoid, they will quickly respond in ways that reinforce this negative expectation. Many people know about the power of self-fulfilling prophecy through Norman Vincent Peale’s famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking.17An experiment demonstrating the self-fulfilling prophecy was described by Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal in a classic book entitled Pygmalion in the Classroom.18 Teachers were led to believe that some students were high achievers and others were not. In reality, the students had been assigned at random to the two categories. The teachers’ expectations about high achievers led them to treat the “high achievers” differently than the other students, and subsequent achievement tests confirmed that the self-fulfilling prophecy indeed led to higher scores for the randomly selected “high achievers.”

Such studies made it absolutely clear that when experimenters know how participants “should” behave, it is impossible not to send out unconscious signals. This is why scientists use the double-blind experimental design, so that their personal expectations do not contaminate the research results. And this is why we cannot fully trust fascinating psychic stories reported by groups that expect such things to occur, unless they also demonstrate that they are aware of, know how to, and did control for expectation biases.

An important consequence of the confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy is that the more we think we already know the answer, the more difficult it is for us to judge new evidence fairly. This is precisely why scientific committees charged with evaluating the evidence in controversial fields such as psi must be composed of scientists who have no strong prior opinions about the topic. It is too bad that the National Research Council committee did not heed its own advice.

Because of the confirmation bias, skeptics who review a body of psi experiments are likely to select for review only the few studies that confirm their prior expectations. They will assume that all the other studies they could have reviewed would have had the same set of real or imagined problems. And they end up confirming their prior position. For example, one of skeptical psychologist Susan Blackmore’s favorite arguments against parapsychology is based upon a single occasion when she thought she had reason to suspect one set of experiments. For years now, she has used that single experience to justify her doubt about all other psi experiments.19

THE CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE

The Scientific TruthOf Psychic Phenomena

Dean I. Radin, Ph.D.

Hindsight Bias and other perceptual distortions

 

In the five stages of the acceptance of new ideas, Stage 4 occurs when the idea has become so well adopted that people claim that “I knew it all along.” This is not (always) just an attempt to usurp the glory; it can also reflect something called hindsight bias.

Many studies have shown that once people are aware of the correct answer to something, they are certain that they would have known the answer, even if they were previously uninformed. Knowledge of the correct answer allows us to build a nice story around the answer, and when the answer is “taken away” in our imagination, the story remains. The story structure that contained the right answer makes it seem as though we would have obviously selected the right answer.

Hindsight bias also affects recall of our confidence in the truth of an assertion. That is, if we find out that an earlier assertion was indeed true, this will increase our recalled confidence in its truth. And if we discover that the assertion was false, it will decrease our recalled confidence in its truth. Let’s say we were originally very impressed by a certain telepathy experiment. Later, we heard a rumor somewhere that this study contained a flaw (real or imagined).

Hindsight bias will covertly reconstruct our memory so that we begin to recall that we were actually not at all impressed by the experiment in the first place. Hindsight bias also occurs if we are repeatedly exposed to an assertion. Regardless of whether the assertion is true, repetition will improve our memory of it and, as a result, falsely boost our confidence in its truth! This means that incessant television shows with stories about angels and aliens will boost our confidence in those ideas, completely independently of whether those stories are true.

Mediated Evidence

Most of what we know about the world at large, especially about science, and even more so about psi research, comes not through our personal experience but through heavily refined, preprocessed, “mediated” information on television and in magazines and books. All the informational and motivational biases already mentioned operate on this mediated information just as they would have operated on the evidence if we had seen it with our own eyes.

The difference is that we’ve learned (it is hoped) that preprocessed information invariably presents only part of the story. Someone had to decide what to present and what to leave out, and this means we should always be wary of scientific evidence presented in the brief formats available on television shows. When a program host says, “Here’s the evidence for psychic phenomena. Now you decide what to believe,” this sounds great but it’s actually a ridiculous assignment. We haven’t been shown all the evidence, nor do we have any guidelines about how to evaluate the evidence. All we saw were a few selected bits that looked good on TV.

To overcome the suspected biases in any source of mediated or predigested information, we should look for multiple sources of similar information and see if the evidence converges. Of course, this takes effort, usually more effort than most people are willing to spend. In addition, informational and motivational biases provide very reasonable-feeling excuses to ignore any mediated evidence that contradicts our beliefs. If we don’t like what the TV show is saying, we just flip the channel.

The television medium in particular is designed to manipulate our attentional biases by playing the commercials a little louder, by making pro grams faster-paced and brighter, and by escalating the number of emotionally stimulating scenes. Television rarely presents information about what actual data mean, or how data were collected, or how to under stand the analysis and interpretation of the evidence. Television shows are forced to bypass most of the caveats and alternative explanations that form the cautious side of science, because the alternatives are not always so simple to convey.

Because most of what people know about “the paranormal” comes through television programs and movies, those who would like to know what to believe often assess the quality of the evidence through the credibility of the show. A calm, sober presentation of evidence on the PBS science program Nova should carry more evidential weight than a sensational ghost story on a “tabloid” program. This sounds reasonable, except for something called the “sleeper effect.”20

The sleeper effect is a memory distortion whereby information be comes separated from its source. Let’s say that we see a silly ghost story on a sensational, “tabloid” show. Later, we see a scientific psi experiment de scribed on a sober science program. Initially, we will perceive the ghost story as less credible than the experiment, but after a while the information from the tabloid show and the science show will become mixed up in memory. Soon the ghost story and the psi experiment will be remembered as equally evidential, because the sources of the information have been for gotten. If our prior opinion says that ghosts are silly, then the psi experiment must also be silly—because we will assume that they both came from the same source.

Beyond the Perceptual Filters

Beyond expectation, hindsight bias, and cognitive dissonance, psychotherapists have identified many other ways that the mind consciously and unconsciously protects itself from seeing what it does not wish to see. These mental protection schemes, which are the emotional first cousins of the more intellectually motivated perceptual and cognitive biases, have been labeled suppression, reaction formation, repression, identification, dissociation, and projection.21 Let’s examine them briefly.

Suppresion

Suppression refers to a conscious avoidance of something we may wish to do or say. Say you’re in a meeting where your boss is about to give a presentation to some important clients. You notice to your horror that your boss’s toupee has slipped, and it now bears a striking resemblance to a squirrel perched on his head. You have an overriding impulse to laugh, but you suppress your impulse, because laughing would cause a public embarrassment that might put your job in jeopardy.

People who do not control their impulses, such as when they are drunk, are perceived as impulsive and antisocial. For the wheels of civilization to turn smoothly, some impulses must be suppressed. Litde children speak whatever comes to mind and get away with it, but adults who do this quickly find that they have no friends. Children are taught very early on not to speak about what adults have called “psychic experiences,” because the social order in the Western world does not know what to do with children who are “violating natural law.”

Reaction Formation

Defense mechanisms can be consciously applied, as in suppression, or applied in the unconscious. The deeper in the unconscious the defense is, the more powerful are its effects, and the more difficult it is to recognize the defense as being part of us. Reaction formation is usually just below the level of awareness, but it can be recognized as an unrealistically enthusiastic or wildly negative response to something.

For example, say you really wanted to get a promotion, and you thought that you were the obvious choice, but another office worker, call him Bob, was promoted instead. When you learn of this shocking miscarriage of justice, reaction formation will immediately protect your ego by making Bob out to be a nasty, backbiting, stupid, ugly person.

The same reaction can occur in the opposite direction. Say that you were taught as a child that only bad, evil people become angry. This message may have been deeply engrained throughout your childhood, and it has become part of the way you perceive the world. Thus, when Bob is given the promotion that you worked hard for, your initial impulse to be come angry may be transformed, because you are not allowed to become angry. Reaction formation would cause you to become wildly enthusiastic about the wisdom behind Bob’s promotion, and to tell everyone what a wonderful guy he is.

Typically, when someone complains a little too much, or is inappropriately over-enthusiastic, it may be a sign of reaction formation, in which case the person’s real feelings may be the opposite. As the queen responded after Hamlet asked her how she liked the play, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The more vigorous skeptical attacks on parapsychology are reminiscent of reaction formation. Likewise, some equally emotional at tacks on psi research by psychic enthusiasts (who resent the intrusion of science into their private domain) suggest the presence of underlying defense mechanisms.

Repression

When a feeling or desire is completely blocked from awareness, this is a form of repression. In contrast to suppression, which is a conscious blocking of inner impulses, repression is blocked below conscious awareness. Because repression is hidden from awareness, it is usually inferred from unconscious changes in behavior. For example, suppose your spouse notices that you never call your siblings on the phone. He asks you if some thing happened that has caused you to ignore them. You honestly cannot think of any reason that you don’t call them, so you presume it is because you have been too busy. And yet your spouse notices that you are absent-mindedly clenching your jaw and twisting your fingers as you answer the question. An inference can be made that you have repressed something about your siblings.

Repression also occurs for things that run counter to what we have been taught. Unfortunately, one of the outcomes of going to school is that the natural curiosity we are born with is repeatedly suppressed. We learn not to ask too many questions, not to wonder out loud about certain taboo topics, and to overcome our creative impulses for the sake of conforming to social pressure. In adulthood, these rules may become deeply embedded in the psyche, and are then repressed.

If, as an adult, you have a spontaneous, psychic experience, repression may quickly set in. This protects you from bad memories about how “only crazy people get psychic impressions,” and thus the experience will disappear from awareness almost as fast as it arises. An experience so dramatic that it doesn’t get repressed may weigh heavily as a secret event in your life, rarely admitted to anyone. This practically guarantees that radically new ideas rarely rise to the surface in properly socialized folks. It also guarantees that those who do suggest new ideas are quickly labeled “wacky” or “heretical” and regarded with suspicion. It further explains why the evidence for psi is more or less invisible to the orthodox.

Identification and Introjection

We all carry ideas about who we are, or who we have been taught to believe we are. If we have an inappropriate reaction to something, like a sudden outburst of anger, we might be surprised and think, “Hey, that isn’t me.” When this occurs, it reflects the fact that not only is our perception of the world a construction, but also our sense of who we think we are. That sense of ourselves is formed from identifying with role models during our developmental years, and with role models we admire (or fear) as adults. Some times you may find yourself thinking or saying certain things and suddenly realize that it wasn’t “you” but rather a tape playing from something one of your parents said repeatedly when you were growing up.

If you forget that the mental tape player is not you but your parent, you may begin to identify with the messages on the tape. You will introject an image, or simulation, of that person into you. If you are unlucky, the internal tape recorder may be constantly replaying messages like “you will never amount to anything.” Unconsciously identifying with these messages will lead to the unshakable belief that in fact you never did amount to anything, regardless of what you may have actually accomplished.

Say that one of your favorite college professors insisted that psi is impossible because it contradicts a dozen inviolate Laws of Nature. Say that he or she (but usually he) gave lots of wise-sounding reasons for dismissing the “obviously sloppy” research promoted by psychic researchers who were clearly motivated by secret religious cults. It would take years, or perhaps never, to no longer identify with those skeptical messages.

Dissociation

If you’ve learned that some desires or emotions are taboo, and yet you still have them, then parts of your personality may split off and dissociate from the rest of “you.” In the extreme case of multiple-personality syndrome, these split-off personalities can act like separate people in one body.

For example, if you were brought up in a staunchly atheistic family, religious thoughts or feelings may never have been discussed. If mentioned at all, the topic was immediately derided as superstitious nonsense. As an adult, you may be faced with the uncomfortable situation of having a strong psychological block against something that seems to be a deeply instinctive part of the human psyche. To accommodate both in the same person, the mind compartmentalizes these conflicting desires and beliefs into an “ordinary you” and a “secret you” who yearns for religious experiences.

A mild form of this compartmentalization can be seen in scientists who for six days each week immerse themselves in a purely materialistic, scientific mode that provides no outlet for spiritual ideas. While playing the role of Dr. Scientist, they are essentially atheists, or at least agnostics. And yet on the weekend they attend religious services and sincerely pray that every one in their family remains safe and sound for another week. Maintaining these conflicting attitudes can be mentally painful, especially because it is taboo to mix science and religion. So the mind compartmentalizes the two “you’s” into personality segments that do not overlap. This dissociation also occurs in scientists who publicly and vigorously deny the existence of psi while harboring a couple of secret psi experiences that they have not admitted to anyone.

Projection

If we unconsciously deny that inner feelings or beliefs are from us, we may project them onto others. Let’s say that “Mary” was taught that it was inappropriate ever to tell a lie. And yet she also discovered that she could manipulate people quite easily by telling lies. Faced with the conflict between what she has been taught and what she does, Mary may perceive that she is surrounded by inveterate liars (“they are lying, not me”).

Because our perception of the world, including our perception of other people, is a mental construction, we are always projecting to some extent. As psychologist Charles Tart says, “Watch out for the tendency to assume that anyone who doesn’t confirm your perception (projection) of him is lying!”22 What then are we to make of extreme skeptics who insist that the only rational explanation for psi is fraud, collusion, or mushy-minded thinking? Or of extreme enthusiasts who do not see any value to constructive criticism of psi research, and who view all critics as malicious, evil rationalists? Could this be projection?

Perception and Belief

All this leads us to predict that a person’s level of commitment to the cur rent scientific worldview will determine his or her beliefs about psi. Be cause perception is linked so closely to one’s adopted view of reality, people who do not wish to “see” psi will in fact not see it. Nor will they view any evidence for psi, scientific or otherwise, as valid. This effect should be strongest in people who are committed to a particular view, motivated to maintain it, and clever enough to create good rationalizations for ignoring conflicting evidence.

We can indirectly test this prediction by examining belief in psi among four groups of people: the general public, college professors, heads of divisions of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and members of the National Academy of Sciences. We would predict that belief in psychic phenomena will decrease as the degree of commitment to and belief in orthodox science increases. Sure enough, as shown in figure 14.1, belief (measured in surveys by questions such as “Do you believe in the certainty or in the possibility of psychic phenomena?”) drops from about 68 percent of the general public to only about 6 percent of members of the National Academy of Sciences. 

It might be argued that this drop in belief is related to the fact that prominent scientists know more about perceptual and memory biases, and about wishful thinking and self-delusion, and this is why they are so skeptical. But another explanation is that the expectations of the scientific elite actually put them more at risk for being swayed by perceptual biases than the general public. After all, the scientific elite have lifelong careers and their credibility on the line. They are strongly motivated to maintain certain belief systems. By contrast, most members of the general public do not know or care about the expectations of science. So if Joe Sixpack and Dr. Scientist both witness a remarkable feat of clairvoyance, we can predict that later, when we ask Joe what he saw, he will describe the incident in matter-of-fact terms. In contrast, when we ask Dr. Scientist what he saw, he may become angry or confused, or deny having seen anything unusual at all.

Given that we see what we wish to see, who is more likely to report genuine psi experiences? Probably not people who enthusiastically subscribe to New Age beliefs, because they see psi everywhere, whether it is really there or not. Probably not confirmed skeptics, because they never see psi any where, whether it is really there or not. And probably not the scientific elite, because they are motivated not to see psi, or at least not to publicly admit that they have had such experiences. This is why the strongest neutral evidence for the existence of psi is the cumulative results of experimental studies, evaluated through a technique like meta-analysis.

Once we realize that preconceptions make it difficult to see the scientific evidence for psi, another question naturally arises: where did these preconceptions come from? The next chapter explores the origins of these assumptions, and discusses why many of those assumptions are no longer justified.

THE CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE

The Scientific TruthOf Psychic Phenomena

Dean I. Radin, Ph.D.