Quote:
Originally Posted by mcromer  Rudism,
Looking at their data analysis, the expectation effect simply cannot work.
That is because the timing of the stimulus is random. There is no way for anyone or anything to know when the next stimulus is going to occur, absent psi. |
The timing of the stimuli used in the computer simulations in the paper I linked early on were random too. Intuitively, it seems like what you state here should be correct--but the simulations show this is wrong. While the effect diminishes as the trial sequences get longer, the fact remains that there are "strategies" that the human brain can apply to situations like this that can give the appearance of some kind of psi effect in the short run, even if there isn't one. You can run the numbers through all manner of statistical analysis after the fact to try to convince yourself that it's not a factor--but we already know that it IS a factor because we can replicate it using a computer simulation.
Until you can devise an experiment that rules out this now known effect at the design phase, it will always be a possible source of artifacts in the data that will render the experiment impotent in the scientific arena.