mediumship study

[joki]

Paul,
Prof. Braude has recently published an interesting book (the gold Leaf Lady.../2007), where he show the difficulty of reproducable PSI phenomena. That is the reason why mediumship studies could fail very easy. I think it is immpossible to convince the hard sceptics from the validity of PSI phenomena, because it does not work like maschines. BTW I have performed as a physician clinical studies and the results even of large and expensive studies are often very divergent. So we have to be careful to conclude that things do not exist, although you can not reproduce them.

[Mike]

Paul,

Regarding Gary Schwartz' mediumship studies, I have heard that he did more experiments after those in the book, The Afterlife Experments, that corrected the flaws in the experiments reported on in the book. Whether or not this is true, I don't know. I am not well read about his work.

I am generally unimpressed with transcripts I've seen of today's celebrity mediums. For one thing, most of them appear to not be trance mediums. Past investigators of mediumship seem to have felt that there was much more potential for striking evidential information to emerge when a medium was in deep trance. Of course, a lot of garbage can emerge in deep trance too.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Mike

I am generally unimpressed with transcripts I've seen of today's celebrity mediums. For one thing, most of them appear to not be trance mediums. Past investigators of mediumship seem to have felt that there was much more potential for striking evidential information to emerge when a medium was in deep trance. Of course, a lot of garbage can emerge in deep trance too.

I suspect that whether a medium uses a trance is just a matter of current fad and habit. It doesn't lend itself well to television.

~~ Paul

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

I suspect that whether a medium uses a trance is just a matter of current fad and habit. It doesn't lend itself well to television.

Well, whether or not current mediums tend not to not use trance as a matter of fad or habit, historically, mental mediums have been divided into two groups -- trance mediums and "clairvoyant" mediums. Some mediums have claimed to be able to do both, but others were primarily one or the other. As you indicate, clairvoyant mediumship lended itself well to "platform" demonstrations, where the medium was in normal state of consciousness and claiming to receive "impressions" from the dead. Trance mediumship would be characterized as the medium losing consciousness (simliar to being under general anesthesia) and the communicating spirit possessing them and speaking through them. It would be the difference between you going to John Edward and asking for a communication from your grandfather, and Edward perhaps saying, "he's showing me x," or "i'm getting a c sound." If you went to a trance medium you might hear a communication that purported to be your grandfather speaking to you directly.

[joki]

Mike, if you are interested in recently published work from Gary Schratz, then you should study the paper of Dr. Beischel in the journal EXPLORE (2007). I have recommend it here two days ago in a previous blog and discussed my concerns, regarding the cold reading problems.

[Mike]

At this site you can download for free a book about the famous medium Mrs. Piper who was studied by William James, Richard Hodgson, and various other investigators. Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research by Michael Sage - Project Gutenberg