[NPC3001]

This was an email I sent to Alex. It was originally supposed to be posted here on the forum but my connection went wacky and I had to send via email. I hope it is well understood that I'm trying here to be helpful and not debunking.

Hey Alex, I really enjoy your show and I found the last episode, your response to Steve Novella and discussion of future endeavors, to be provocative. I'm writing out of concern regarding the subject of mediumship as a viable study for parapsychology. I don't mean to say that it's not viable, rather that it's a subject that should be approached with extreme caution and a very narrow criterion of acceptance. The problem with studying mediumship is that the possible variables are extremely scattered and difficult to narrow down. An experiment on the telepathy of animals can be narrowed down enormously as Sheldrake did. A medium, unlike a dog, can use a great many resources and no matter how many of those resources you eliminate, there's always the legitimate worry of an unanticipated resource remaining. It sounds like you're already aware of some of the cold reading problems evident; asking vague, leading questions, observing body language, firing off facts until one of them hits. You should also keep in mind that a successfully deceitful medium will put on a powerful air of being honest, well-meaning and normal. This includes being wishy-washy about their own talents and passing that up to people as a display of decency and sincerity. Consider how John Edward tells the audience up front that he's often wrong. The audiences' guard is lowered so that Edward can more easily toss off a barrage of generalized details at rapid fire pace until one finally clicks with a person. The medium observes the audience as he lists details, and then he finally mentions one that *gets a reaction.* But more pressingly, be careful about drawing conclusions about the honesty of mediums. A good trick for mediums is to admit the failure of a reading and give the customer his money back. It seems like a loss, but often it's not. The medium wins out in several ways:

A. He continues to seem legitimate to the customer even though he didn't produce a useful result, i.e. his reputation is undamaged if the reading didn't go well.
B. Because of his apparent honesty and humanness the customer may feel confident enough about the medium to recommend his services to friends.
C. He keeps the customer intrigued and sometimes coming back for more. Instead of taking the money up front, any good deceiver in mediumship would rather send away a customer with his money only to have the customer come back on a bad day. It's much easier to read body language and behavior when someone is in distress and much easier to cut through someone's weaknesses to gain trust.

So you can see how this sort of thing can actually be more economically advantageous for the medium in the long run. The point I wish to illustrate is just that mediums can be slippery and they can easily fool scientists who think they've exhausted all possible resources on the medium's part. I know that you addressed this point this last episode and that you were trying to open up the scientific study of mediums even with strong cases of debunking as detailed by Novella. I think you could acknowledge its importance even more by encouraging the use of magicians or other performers to observe experiments on mediumship to ensure that the medium isn't deceiving the scientists in some way. Mediums (fake mediums at least, assuming there are mediums out there who don't use trickery) are extremely clever and creative and very fast-thinking. I believe that part of the reason why mediumship is discouraged by skeptics as a subject of interest for science is *because of this,* because mediums are often clever enough to slide significant data into an experiment no matter how hard the scientist tries to limit the variables. If this happens then the parapsychologist produces compelling results that are nonetheless false and misleading.

As I said before, I take the question of whether or not mediums are real to be a legitimate one for science. But as Michael Prescott has said about medium research in his blog, it's like trying to nail jell-o to a wall. Which is why I felt the wish to encourage you to emphasize the need for extremely tight controls on medium experimentation and frankly, more skepticism even than usual.

NPC