Twitter to test psychic powers in scientific study -

[khephra]

This might just have easily been posted in the "Scientific Debates" forum, but since I came here as an appreciative listener of Skeptiko, I'm putting it here.

See Daily Mail for the complete article, which includes a link to the twitter feed.

Twitter to test psychic powers in scientific study:
By Daily Mail Reporter

Have you ever suspected you could be psychic? Now you can find out thanks to an experiment to be conducted through Twitter.

In the first scientific study to use the social messaging service, experts will investigate 'remote viewing' - the psychic ability to identify distant locations.

Thousands of members of the public will be asked to 'Tweet' their impressions of a randomly chosen spot in the UK visited by one of the researchers.

Then they will vote for which of five photographs on a website shows where the visitor was standing. The trial will be repeated with visually different locations four times.

If at the end of the experiment the votes correctly identify at least three targets, it will support the existence of extra-sensory perception.

Study leader psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire, who specialises in investigating psychic phenomena, said: 'Personally, I'm sceptical, but three hits would be against odds of one in 125, which would be quite impressive.'

He hopes as many as 10,000 people will take part in the research, being conducted in collaboration with New Scientist magazine.

[khephra]

Here's a follow-up from Daily Grail:

Richard Wiseman has posted a summary of the results from last week's Twitter-based study of the psychic sense of remote viewing. In short: the group got 0 out of 4 correct. I'd say that is a fail.

Hopefully the complete set of data is released for further analysis, though I guess there's not a lot to find when the result is 0/4 and no different whether a believer or skeptic. From Richard Wiseman's comments though, I think a significant part of this experiment was about belief in psychic abilities...

Thoughts? I tend to see the flaw in the medium and protocols, rather than the hypothesis itself...

[jacob]

We already discuss this experiment at:
Richard Wisemans twitter remote viewing experiment

I'm closing this thread.