Click here to become a Knight of the Grail by supporting us on Patreon!

Twitter Fails at teh Psychic

By Gregon

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…

When I analysed believers and sceptics separately, the results were the same, with no difference between the groups. So the study didn’t support the existence of remote viewing, and suggested that those who believe in the paranormal are good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and a target .

Now I’m no psychic, but I did see this coming. (Nice to see also that I was right about the nature picture).

Wiseman also has a link to a video feature about the experiment done by the Wall Street Journal – I’ve embedded it below.

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including 'Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife'.

4 Comments

  1. Nothing unexpected
    This is pretty much the result we expected, isn’t it? I wasn’t able to spend as much time analysing my own response to most of the trials as I was the first one, but it’s interesting that we expected most people to go for the leafy path because it was distinct from the other options, and that’s the one that most people went for.

    There’s a number of the comments on the site that are interesting, but this one in particular caught my eye:

    Kasandra Says:
    June 11, 2009 at 1:17 am | Reply

    Actually what I, as an anthropologist, found interesting is that the known effects of a disappearing path on attracting the interest of the eye seems to have taken precedence in most of the trials. Interesting

    I’ve got a number of misgivings about the methods used in this test, and don’t think the results can be used as evidence either for or against RV becasue there were so few controls in place. But I was glad to have been able to take part in the study, and if there were future studies, where the method could somehow fill in the gaps that were present in this one, I’d definitely be up for participating again.
    http://grthink.deviantart.com

    1. Railroaded
      [quote=grthink]There’s a number of the comments on the site that are interesting, but this one in particular caught my eye:

      Kasandra Says:
      June 11, 2009 at 1:17 am | Reply

      Actually what I, as an anthropologist, found interesting is that the known effects of a disappearing path on attracting the interest of the eye seems to have taken precedence in most of the trials. Interesting[/quote]

      I found that comment very interesting. In my ‘visualisation’ of the second experiment, I was seeing a railway track disappearing into the distance. After a few minutes this morphed more into a ‘church steeple’, although sharing the same ‘converging lines’ shape. So when the choices for Experiment 2 were shown, I was torn between B, E and C. I eventually went for B, because it was closest to the ‘railway line look’, though Wiseman’s location was actually nothing like that (being C).

      But looking over the four experiments in retrospect, there seems to be a disproportionately high number of ‘converging line’ images – canals, paths, roads, shopping aisles. Was this an intentional part of the experiment, or is it just something that ‘catches the eye’ of Richard Wiseman and therefore became a common element in the image sets?

      Kind regards,
      Greg
      ——————————————-
      You monkeys only think you’re running things
      @DailyGrail

  2. I wonder …
    Is there any chance, perhaps, that while this man was ‘just sitting’ in his chosen spot that he was THINKING about a completely different spot (such as converging railraod tracks) and those attempting a remote view were picking up on his thoughts rather than his location? There seem to me to be too many unknown variables for this to have been an experiment that produced worthwhile data or results.

    Just a thought.

    Regards, Kathrinn

    1. Possibly. Its difficult to
      Possibly. Its difficult to design an experiment for this i think. If this was the case though it would be interesting as it would seem to show that we were better at picking up on peoples imagination than on their senses, which would be interesting in itself. Especially when viewed down the tunnel of a matrix type world philosophy. Perhaps we pick up on imagination over the senses as the imagination is the only part that is real…

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mobile menu - fractal