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Originally Posted by Phronk  Who cares if he threw out trials where the parrot didn't say any key words? The fact that, out of trials in which he did say key words, they lined up with what his owner was looking at in a different room, is incredible. That alone is evidence for telepathy, if the methodology was sound. |
Anyone who's interested in the outcome of the experiment should care. Why were they thrown out? Do we assume that the psychic connection was broken during these trials? That the message sending failed somehow? That the bird simply chose to ignore the message that was being sent? What is the basis for this assumption?
The included trials are also only interesting if we compare them to a baseline, so we know how prevalent these particular words are in the bird's speech to begin with. Just as a hypothetical example, if a common phrase for the bird to say is "flower ball bicycle house," and he is fairly likely to say this during any given 2 minute period where he is speaking intelligible words, then you are going to get a lot of hits if you are flashing pictures of flowers, balls, bicycles, and houses to the owner (any one of those would count as a hit if the bird spoke that sentence during the two minute period). This isn't proof of telepathy, it's just proof that you used images of stuff that the bird likes saying a lot. It's only interesting if there is a significant difference between how often the bird says "flower" when a flower message is being sent compared with how often the bird says "flower" when no flower message is being sent. Sheldrake's study didn't take this into account.
If someone can summarize to me why these criticisms are invalid, then I'd appreciate it.