Dr Steve Novella and The (Pseudo?)Skeptics' Guide to the Universe

[joki]

Paul, you arguing in the same way as Pin van Lommel does in his NDE research. He discussed EEG findings instead of MRI, which were critisized by sceptics. What do changes in blood flow mean? Sure you would them as shown in study with nuns while meditating. But this does not show PSI effects. This really an interesting study with some funny conlcusions. Realy interesting, are these guys scientitists?

[joki]

I am sorry for the writing mistakes. Once again.
Paul, you arguing in the same way as Pin van Lommel does in his NDE research. He discussed EEG findings instead of MRI, which were critisized by sceptics. What do changes in blood flow mean? Sure you would find them as shown in studies with nuns while meditating (also during remote viewing states). But this does not show any kind of PSI effects. This is really an interesting study with some funny conlcusions. Realy interesting, are these guys scientitists?

[orca007]

Hi Paul,

I guess I should clarify. It isn't that I don't know what I'm doing when I work with clients. I do know what I am doing. But it will not make sense to you in a way that fits with your model of science.

You know, I sometimes think it's like parallel universes or something. I have a model. You (science) has a model. Both models are true at the same time. But neither fit will with the other. But logically, somehow they must. And I do not know how to fit psi into your model.

I'll give you an example of what I do everyday that happened just this week. And perhaps you can see why what I see with psi just doesn't fit in your model. You can look at the various factors involved and you will why my work is difficult to quantify or duplicate. And I think it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater to dismiss this stuff as invalid. I simply don't agree that everything that is not proven is somehow invalid. To me, it just means not scientifically proven.

Example:
I'm in an ICU unit with a cancer patient in a coma, on dialysis, breathing machine, etc. I immediately see a distortion in the aura on the left kidney. It looks grey and mottled, above the body about 2 in. The field above the heart is very prickly and unsettled, like a little tornado. I also discern, without touching the patient, that the entire governing vessel meridian is a complete mess. The whole body is torqued like an S. I feel an burning lower back pain in my body so I know this patient has it also.

I notice see an ethereal presence on the left side of the hospital bed. It is a woman. She is telling me also that this patient does not have much longer. to live. I am sad. But she is clearly stating this is not how it is supposed to end, in an ICU. She is telling me to work the kidney aura of the remaining kidney. So I do. Then she is telling me to work the torque in the spine and clear out the cloudiness around the heart. So I do. I never touch the patient.

The room around me gets very hot. The patient's brother is in the room, watching all of this. He's an engineer who knows zilch of this stuff. I can tell he thinks its nuts but at this point, they need all the help that an be mustered. He is watching all of the heart and BP monitors, and says that while I am working, the patient's BP has gone down markedly. It's a very good thing.

The patient suddenly wakes up from his coma, and waves at me and then goes out again. It startles me. The nurse is surprised, since he's heavily sedated. Very unusual.

I hear 4 days later the patient is removed off dialysis. Kidney function in that one kidney came back up to a healthy level. The doctors areexcited, as this stuff just "doesn't happen". But it did. And they discovered a very bad abscess infected on his lower back, from bed sores...

And, of course, instead of wondering what might have happened from the energy work to support this, they shrugged it off as "one of those things."

The patient went on to go home with his family. He had a precious 15 days of additional life and awakeness he was able to spend with his family. And he passed peacefully at home. The spirit that talked to me at the hospital was aboslutely right. It wasn't supposed to end in an ICU, and that is why I was there. To get him well enough to get him out of there...

How does this situation fit in with your scientific model? I could tell you my model, the way I see energy. But it simply won't make sense to you. You will find it rubbish. I could tell you how I unwound the central nervous system and supported the kidney field. I could tell you how I saw the energetic fields of the body blocked, where they were blocked, that it looked like funny curly ques to me, and what I did to open them up. I knew exactly what I was doing. From my perspective and my model.

But it doesn't fit your model. After all, you simply have no way to measure the aura of a kidney. Or why I would see it as grey vs. yellow vs. red. I can only state what I see. And if science can't measure it, well, what can i do? I can only state what happens, based on what I see.

I mean, there is still enough "measurable" stuff in this simple example that someone could look at, if they wanted to. BP dropped several points while I was working. Kidney came back in a most unusual way. Patient woke up from a deep coma, etc. Witnesses were there. Unusual stuff, given the gravity of this man's condition. But I guess science will shrug that it's just one of those things...

And if I was in another situation just like that, I know I would not get the same info. This stuff is not repeatable. That's why it's hard to measure. I can't control for most of the variables going on with the patient. And I can't control for what I see aurically either. It certainly won't be the same direction from the other side. Who knew why this lady showed up in the room and/or why? And sometimes I may not see much at all.

That is the whole problem. I see what cannot be measured. I don't know why I see what I do, and sometimes I don't see anything and sometimes what I see makes no sense or I see absolutely zilch. I use this information in my work to the best I can, in working with patients. And sometimes things happen. Not because I'm so miraculously special, but that I am open to using this psi info when it comes in. I am actively using it, instead of discarding it as random noise.

To another energy medicine person who sees energy also, it makes complete sense....there are power centers in the body that can be psychically seen in the aura, there are colors in the field, there are flows of energy in the body that can be tweaked, knowledge from strange sources does sometimes show up, etc etc. Except where I see grey, that person may see yellow, etc. It's different for each reader.

So it's not that I don't know what I'm doing. It's just not acceptable per the rules of your scientific discovery. So it gets discarded as rubbish.

Unfortunately, I can't give you a scientific theory. I wish I could. As I stated, I am not a scientist..I'm just suggesting that what we have so far is not adequate. Something is missing. Else, there would not be things like my example happening, which is what I work with every day. Maybe minds more brilliant than mine can come up with an equation or theory of some kind of how and in what way psi shows up. I think that is exciting.


My .02.

Orca

[Interesting Ian]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

They require an online subscription.

~~ Paul

They refuse to send you a copy of the paper?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Maybe I am not quite understanding what you mean. You can preform any experiment so badly that it gives no result! What exactly do you think would be a 'good thing'?

You may not credit this, but I would class myself as still somewhat on the fence regarding the reality of ?, but if people try to refute the idea without trying their hardest to make it happen, that feels more like propaganda to me.

The tables are turned on the psi believers. They often complain that scientists are closed-minded, that the methodology of science needs to be expanded to include some additional empirical methods of investigating psi (whatever those might be), that regular science has entrenched approaches to subjects, and so forth. But now, while they want "regular" scientists to investigate psi, they also require them to follow the entrenched methodologies of parapsychology, in order to give psi a fair chance. Ain't that ironic?

The request would make more sense if parapsychologists had theory-based reasons why certain things have to be done in certain ways. As it stands, the reasons are mostly subjective: Joe did better than Sally; it ought to be quiet in the room where the subject is; things seems better in the morning than the afternoon. And, of course, the unfalsifiable ace of spades: the experimenter effect.

Having said that, by all means, let's get parapsychologists involved with the folks who have the fMRI equipment! Let's get a magician in there, too.

~~ Paul

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Even if the brain is merely a filter, psi still "occurs in the brain." It doesn't occur in the heart, lung, or big toe.

Even that is not certain. If someone feels physically touched by say a hypothetical poltergeist, their reaction would most probably show up in an fMRI but it doesn't necessarily mean the experience was triggered by their own brain. Over 30% of sightings of apparitions are simultaneous sightings, the apparition collectively seen (and there are at least 130 documented cases of collective sightings) these do not necessarily mean they are all suffering from confabulation - we have already discussed the difficulty in assuming so in the thread 'prove hallucinations are generated in the brain' topic. Also Near Death Experiences seem to occur during when the brain is electrically dead too.

You're overfocusing on the word source. The ultimate source could be outside the brain, but there still has to be a second-stage source or sources within the brain, the nexuses between the outside source and the brain's processing of the information.

Yes but in this experiment there is no reason to assume they were generating a significant degree of psi in the first place when looking for a fMRI correlation. They merely set up conditions they think are conducive to psi and assumed psi was occurring. In fact (without reading the paper .... . yet) it would seem they did not find psi occurring at all, so assuming no fMRI correlation is rather meaningless.

Have the first two groups got good psi?

No one knows for sure. The reports of recalling a past life by children under the age of the six means the research has to be done. Both these groups have very, very little psi research done upon them because psychiatrists, medical professionals etc. generally object to research in both these categories. IMHO if psi is higher in those two categories than in normal, healthy adults, I think it would be powerful evidence that the brain is filtering an external mind and psi as a brain generated function (the super-psi hypothesis) is wrong.

[David Bailey]

Orca,

I would like to address some of the points in your post addressed to Paul.

As you will have realised, most of the people posting here have at least some science background. However, at least half of them - including me - are far more receptive to the possibility that some ψ phenomena are real.

I really do wish that all of you 'psychics' would use the term 'psychic energy' rather than 'energy'. Unfortunately, science has appropriated the term energy, and uses it is a very specific way. They tend to forget that the word has a rather broader meaning in common usage. I am pretty sure that whatever you are talking about does not come in units of joules, and it is good to avoid confusion!

I think it is great that you are posting here, and I hope that you continue - it helps to broaden debates that can get a bit narrow at times!

I can see that testing what you do in a scientific way can be very daunting, and in many ways I think the best way to move the debate along would be to wow people.

Next time you visit an ICU, would it be possible to do what you do to every patient in the room - or would you need to get too close or take too much time to achieve this surreptitiously? What I am thinking, is that if every time you visited, a whole bunch of patients improved unexpectedly, nurses, and maybe even doctors would soon notice.

This would still not be a scientific test of your abilities, but it might open up the way to something of that sort. In any such test, it is important not to let yourself be pushed into accepting conditions that you consider unreasonable - some researchers seem to hate the idea of ψ so much that they simply wish to suppress it - and to agree everything before the trial happens.

One interesting aspect of your methods is that they are perhaps related to those that medicine men of the Amazon might use. Science dismisses their methods totally except when it wants to find a plant to supply a new drug. At that point, the advice of these people seems to be sought and used!

David

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

Even that is not certain. If someone feels physically touched by say a hypothetical poltergeist, their reaction would most probably show up in an fMRI but it doesn't necessarily mean the experience was triggered by their own brain.

Agreed, but the study was not undertaken to determine the source of psi, only whether it shows up with a unique fMRI signature. If there is no fMRI signature for supposed psi events, then no one will bother going further to find the source of the event.

Yes but in this experiment there is no reason to assume they were generating a significant degree of psi in the first place when looking for a fMRI correlation. They merely set up conditions they think are conducive to psi and assumed psi was occurring. In fact (without reading the paper .... . yet) it would seem they did not find psi occurring at all, so assuming no fMRI correlation is rather meaningless.

I agree that they may not have managed to generate any psi at all. But there is nothing more they can do until someone comes up with the "classic repeatable experiment" for psi, the experiment that works all the time and can be used in classrooms and labs to reliably recreate the effect. If some parapsychologist thinks he has such an experiment, he should contact these guys to run a joint study.

~~ Paul

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

The request would make more sense if parapsychologists had theory-based reasons why certain things have to be done in certain ways. As it stands, the reasons are mostly subjective: Joe did better than Sally; it ought to be quiet in the room where the subject is; things seems better in the morning than the afternoon. And, of course, the unfalsifiable ace of spades: the experimenter effect.

Having said that, by all means, let's get parapsychologists involved with the folks who have the fMRI equipment! Let's get a magician in there, too.

~~ Paul

Well, as I said before, if you really want to refute something, you absolutely have to try hard to achieve the opposite! I suspect a lot of skeptics find that hard to stomach. People like Dean Radin can possibly help make a ψ experiment work. If you bring them in, they won't upset the null hypothesis, but they will certainly make people like me take such an experiment more seriously.

There is hardly any experiment in science that you can't do badly, and if doing it badly means that you get the results you expect and can publish most easily, that is dangerous!

David

[Interesting Ian]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

Yes but in this experiment there is no reason to assume they were generating a significant degree of psi in the first place when looking for a fMRI correlation. They merely set up conditions they think are conducive to psi and assumed psi was occurring.

Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

I agree that they may not have managed to generate any psi at all.

The whole argument is based around the notion that if psi is operating, the neuronal responses must be different from when it is not operating. Hence we surely must take it as a given that statistically significant results were obtained suggesting that psi is either occurring or apparently occurring.

If there were no indication whatsoever that psi is operating then obviously indistinguishable neuronal responses would be obtained regardless of whether psi exists or not.

But of course we need to get hold of the paper before discussing it.