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Originally Posted by joki  Alex discussed his experiences from the last months regarding the sceptical views in his last podcast. At the end he wants us to think about a mediumship study. I think the most problem is to rule out cold reading techniques, which is not so easy. I think that G.S. studies are not bad, but still do not completely rule out cold reading. I was really surprised after I have watched the videos from professional mentalists. They could fake a lot of PSI phenomena. Even a name could be enough to suggest some information by remote viewing. I have discussed this with George Hansen by some emails. I recommend to study the work of Derren Brown or Criss Angel, who dismiss PSI phenomena. I think most important is to invite good medium and some sceptical magicians (must be sceptical; ?Derren Brown?) and bring them together in order to test the abilities. But this design could also fail. Stephen Braude has shown in his recently published book that PSI does sometimes not work, when psychical stress is involved. |
Good ideas. I have invited Derren Brown on Skeptiko (more than once), but received no reply. I think it would be interesting to set up an experiment where a metalist and a medium are both put through a series of tests with tighter and tighter controls at every round.
Must say, I'm still not sure how you think "cold reading" could factor into Gary Schwartz's work. In his research the mediums:
- never meet the sitter
- never see the sitter during the reading
- never talk to the sitter (all done through email)
- never get any responses from the sitter (no Q&A)
- the researcher doesn't know who's being read for
I just don't see where "cold reading" can come into play here.