Thursday, January 06, 2011

ESP?

ESP has generally sat alongside UFO sightings, flouridation, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, life on Mars and the like, as the ranting of lunatics. That was until now, as a respected Psychological journal is planning to publish a paper that claims ESP does in fact exist. Daryl J. Bem, a ienowned emeritus professor at Cornell, has been testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen for over 10 years: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html?pagewanted=print. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects who were tested by, among other things, categorizing pictures and finding pornographic images they couldn't see. Like much of the work in randomized social science research, the methods are open to major questions. Just because kids find pornographic images they can't see at a rate of 53% versus 50% does not really indicate any strong ability to see into the future. Nor does reversing the order of a classic memory test by finding that students had much better success at memorizing words they later studied. This sort of silliness would probably be completely ignored, but for the respect these experiments hold in general. For example, in the increasingly popular world of cognitive science, subjects are hooked up to machines that look at their brain activity while they are offered various stimuli -- after which major claims are sometimes made about what this says about human nature; without acknowledging that experiments are about as realistic as reality based TV. In any case, maybe ESP does exist. If you have it, feel free to email me with the winning lottery numbers for the next draw.

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