In the last episode of Skeptiko I mentioned how little I thought of quirky psychological anomalies Skeptics offer up as explanation of parapsychological phenomenon.
Michael Shemmer's standard take on this is the video of the gorilla in the basketball game (see the link below for more). This is usually followed by a wave of the hand and not so subtle implication that this kind of perceptual blindness is probably what accounts for all the foolish parapsychological phenomena folks experience.
After the last episode of Skeptiko, one of our listeners (Tom) sent me a similar, and very entertaining clip, from Dr. Richard Wiseman. Take a look before reading further:
Quirkology - The Colour-changing Card Trick
It's not that I don't find this stuff interesting... I think it's great. It just doesn’t have much to do with explaining psychic readings, DogsThatKnow, PK, or anything else in parapsychology.
Here's why... all these tricks our brain/mind play on us are easily counter-balanced by our ability to reason. Let me prove it. Go back and watch the Wiseman video again, but this time look for the color changes. Did you catch them? Of course you did! It's easy once you know the game and pay attention. So, why should it be any harder to ferret out fake psychics, or animal communicators? It's not!
Worried about falling prey to the cruel duplicity of a ‘cold reading'? Call up a psychic (as I did about a year ago) and tell them you're not a debunker but that the most valuable thing you could get out of their reading is confirmation of psychic phenomena. Explain that you would therefore like to provide them with as little information as possible during the reading. ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answers usually works well enough. Once they agree with to this protocol, proceed with the reading. When you’re done, listen to the recording and rate the accuracy of each answer, or have a friend/spouse independently rate it. You may have to try a few different psychics (it took me three tries), but once you get a good reading the results will be self-evident.
The same holds true for our DogsThatKnow experiments. You may recall the Skeptiko interview with Richard Wiseman where he admitted that his data matched Rupert Sheldrake’s, but he refused to accept the overall conclusions of the experiment. He referenced the, ‘many difficulties of running experiments I the field’ as a probable explanation for Shedrake’s ‘error’. This is a perfect example of this ‘blindness fallacy’. The DogsThatKnow expeiremnt is very simple and straightforward. With the least bit of safeguards for data contamination the results can be counted on… unless you’re a Skeptic.