First Sight

Interviews from the 2012 Parapsychology Association conference with Dr. Daryl Bem, Dr. George Williams, Dr. Athena Drewes and Dr. Robert Van de Castle.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris and Dr. Richard Grego for interviews from the 2012  Parapsychology Association conference. During one of the interviews Dr. Daryl Bem reveals the secret psychologists need to know about quantum theory:

I’d like to alert everyone I know to a vital new voice (new to me, at least):  Julia Mossbridge.  Here’s what she says about herself:

“I’m a Research Associate in the Dept. of Psychology at Northwestern University. My background is in neuroscience and perceptual psychology (esp. auditory temporal perception and perceptual learning). My current work is in cross-modal perception, sex differences, and physiological bases of working memory. As scientists go, I’m unusually open to spirituality, as long as the approach is pragmatic and non-dogmatic.”

Mossbridge recently published a remarkable paper (with Patrizio Tressoldi and Jessica Utts) that has drawn unusual media attention.  They demonstrated with meta-analysis a robust effect:  emotionally significant events that will soon transpire in the future, but that cannot in any way be rationally predicted, can nevertheless be responded to implicitly by people at a subtle, physiological level.  Various indications of arousal can be seen to increase prior to the event, as if the person is unconsciously apprehending the coming thing and beginning a response to it.

Mossbridge is a bold scientist to put forth this finding.  I hope it does not do her too much professional harm.  On the positive side, she may be doing our science a lot of good.

Her thoughts are worth following.  First, you may be interested in her book:  Unfolding.  Here she shows a scientist’s carefulness of thought combined with a mystic’s sensibility, and gently teaches ways to think about one’s own spiritual depth, and ways to nourish it.

In Her blog, she displays the continuing adventure that can come from not artificially separating the research one does in the laboratory from the more existential research one does in pursuing the implications of new spiritual assumptions.  I think you will find her thoughts as stimulating as I do.

Great article on Jim Carpenter’s “First Sight” theory to consolidate psi with everyday life {see ‘solid science’ link} www.huffingtonpost.com/james-carpenter-phd/first-sight_b_1940728.html …

Not Second Sight, But First Sight

My major thesis is that psychic abilities such as ESP — long considered to occur only in “gifted” individuals or on rare traumatic occasions — are, in fact, ongoing subconscious processes that…

Huffington Post @HuffingtonPost · Follow

The level of discourse on the internet is notoriously variable in quality, and often descends into base levels of polemical venting.  This may be expected in questions of pop-culture fashion or politics, but it is surprising at first to discover it turning up in what one might assume to be scientific discussions.

Nowhere else in science does irrational polemic seem to turn up so reliably as when discussions of scientific studies on the “paranormal” are involved.

For example, A recent Huffington Post article on the book First Sight:  ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life  drew many respectful and thoughtful comments, pro and con, as one might hope; but then a little band of the psi-denying vigilantes who seem to prowl the internet discovered the posts and salted most of the responses with rude and peremptory dismissals of a sort that seem to flow from some central script.  For instance, they seem often to be arguing against proponents of creationism, even when that is far from the issue at hand.  Their arguments are typically buttressed by links to posts of other “authorities” that share their own biases and arrogance but don’t really attempt much balanced debate.

Then, as is typical, some more balanced responses are offered to the vigilantes.  However, they seem by then to have gone on searching for some other irrationality to debunk and offer no response (or respect) to these rebuttals.

I think this is a fascinating element in our cultural discourse right now and it bears some attention and attempt to understand its dynamics.

To further this effort, I will quote the posts to the Huffington Post piece from a denier who calls herself (or himself) Pulseteresa.  Following that will be the responses of an apparent psychologist named Psychnow.

Pulseteresa:

“Bem’s experiment has not been replicated meaning it was likely a one off fluke:

www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/15/precognition-studies-curse-failed-replications

The above link also points out some of the methodological flaws in Bem’s study as well as Bem’s obstructionism in getting the studies that did not replicate his findings published. This gives the unmistakable impression that Bem is not interested having his research truthfully examined. There are two good reasons for this:

1) Researchers sometimes get overly emotionally invested in their research and thus are protective about it. This is exactly why attempts at replication by multiple third parties who don’t have an emotional attachment to the original results is necessary. People cannot be fully objective. Science provides our best chance at pure objectivity. As physicist Richard Feyman stated so precisely:
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

2) Positive outcome psi research is always ultimately invalidated.

whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/tests-of-the-supernatural-fail-again-new-study-cant-replicate-findings-of-precognition/

This second link provides, in addition to a critique of Bem’s research, contains this quote from Bem, a classic example of psi researchers discounting psi studies with negative outcomes. The quote in my followup comment is an excerpt from Bem’s response to the researchers who were unable to replicate Bem’s findings:

“Ritchie, Wiseman, and French are well known as psi skeptics, whereas I and the investigators of the two successful replications are at least neutral with respect to the existence of psi.”

Bem here implies that all scientific research can be negatively influenced by a skeptical attitude. This is not only exceptionally unscientific, it’s absolute nonsense. (Although it’s a typical move for psi researchers). Skepticism is a cornerstone of science, as is repeatability of research outcomes. Bem certainly should know this.

My point of addressing Bem’s research (click first link in this article) here is to point out that the author of this article is relying on falsified premises to prop up his own nonsensical hypothesis.”

In response to these statements, Psychnow wrote:

“You raise important points: Scientists do get emotionally involved in their work, and we always need to be on guard against this; Second, replication is important to help us know when any experimental result is valid.

There are also two very important errors in fact in your posts.

First, you say that Bem’s research is flawed and that he has been obstructive in the publication of non-replications. Bem actually dealt with most of the issues brought up before the paper was ever published, with critical review editors. He has responded fully and satisfactorily to the questions raised since his paper was published. If you cite the criticisms you must also cite his responses. Bem has been anything but obstructive. I can think of no other case in which a psychologist put so much effort into making it easy for other scientists to carry out exact replications of his procedures, and do their own analyses of his data. He had nothing to do with the non-publication of replication attempts. This was a decision of editors, and they have explained their reasons, which are standard in the field.

Have his results been successfully replicated by others? Only a few have been tried, and some efforts are still ongoing. So far the answer is Yes and No. Some have succeeded and some have not. The more exact replications have tended to succeed more those that significantly altered procedures. This will all have to be sorted out when more results are in.

The second error is the statement that psi effects are always invalidated. Monumentally wrong! In my experience, psi effects replicate about as well as any in the rest of psychology. This doesn’t imply a defect in psychology. Same is true in, say, microbiology or biochemistry. Replication efforts are routine there as part of trying to build some next step,and first tries routinely fail. This doesn’t mean the prior research was dishonest or poorly done. Only that some important variables are not well understood or communicated. This gets sorted out by lots of off-line communication, lab visits, so on, until everyone gets a better grasp of how things work. Bem’s findings will get sorted out too.

Parapsychology has a lot of replication in fact. The book that the post is about (First Sight) is not meant as a proof of psi, but it covers a great deal of research, most of it well-replicated. There are 52 dense pages of references. You would find it helpful to look at some of the 1000-plus research papers cited there.

One last point about your posts: It is hardly “exceptionally unscientific” or “absolute nonsense” to say, as Bem implies, that the attitude of an experimenter might be an important variable in how some effect shows up in an experiment. This is actually quite well established, and may turn out to be important in Bem’s findings as well. Robert Rosenthal, in an earlier generation, showed that many, often inadvertent, differences in experimenters’ attitudes had strong effects on the expression of many psychological processes that no one had thought to be susceptible in that way. More recently, hundreds of studies are coming out that show that subtle, implicit situational cues (including experimenter’s attitudes) can have major effects on whether and how some psychological process will be expressed. For one example, see the study by Milyavsky et al (Consciousness & Cognition, 2012) that showed that very subtle experimenter manipulations of implicit motivation can have big effects on how subliminal primes affect the choices people make. It’s not that hard to subtly influence how people respond to other subtle cues. This is not unscientific, it is just science sorting out something that is more complicated than a layperson might  assume.”

This is a drama that is being played out over and over in internet discussions of many topics, such as remote viewing, ganzfeld research, Bem’s Feeling the Future studies, presentiment, Sheldrake’s research on Feeling Stared At, and any other of the currently topical parts of parapsychological research.  This is a great curiosity:  Why is this happening?  What drives it? 

I think this question should concern us not primarily because we might value good scientific work on the “paranormal” but because we value a climate of discourse for all areas of scientific work that is respectful and not polemical.  Science must progress by a process of rational debate in which all parties listen as well as talk. Highly polarized polemic that is driven to win rather than to reason splits us in science as much as it currently splits American society in other areas, such as our divorce courts and our political contests.  This may seem like fun for a few for a moment, but it does none of us any good.

A theory is only as good as the hypotheses it generates and the scientific results that flow from it.  At the recent conference of the Parapsychological Association, James Carpenter and three colleagues (Christine Simmonds-Moore, Steve Moore and Ferrell Carpenter) presented the results of a second of two studies based upon First Sight hypotheses.  One general hypothesis was that extrasensory “primes” (set up as targets in a study that were not available to the senses) should function in the same way that subliminal primes do:  by making information more or less attractive when it is fully exposed to visual inspection later.  The most common pattern is for subliminal exposures to make something seem a little more appealing later.  This is called the Mere Exposure Effect (MEE).  We were looking for an extrasensory MEE, along with the standard subliminal MEE.

We were also interested in trying to predict when people would respond to subliminal and extrasensory exposures positively (by liking more) and when their response would be negative (by liking something less).  To predict subliminal effects we took some things that have been found to be important in previous research:  Need for Cognition (positive), Need for Structure (negative), being oriented to subtle experiences (positive), and being prone to quickly become bored (negative).  To predict extrasensory response we took some predictions from First Sight theory, some of which had also been supported by previous research.  These included a person’s openness to experience, their vulnerability to anxiety, their belief that ESP was real or not, their tolerance for loosened boundaries with other people, and their level of creativity, among other things.

To test these things we asked people to stare at a computer monitor while things were flashed on the screen very briefly and then immediately masked by a complex pattern.  This procedure prevented anyone from having a conscious awareness of what was being flashed.  When the exposure was a subliminal one, the material flashed was a picture drawn from a standard set used in psychological research.  When the presentation was extrasensory, a different picture was flashed, but it was also covered completely by an opaque black rectangle.  In other words, the picture could not be seen even if were shown on the monitor forever!  Like any good ESP target, it was completely unavailable in any way for the participants.  Then after these viewings were completed, the participants were shown pairs of pictures and asked which they preferred.  In each pair, one had just been exposed (either subliminally or extrasensorily) and one had not.  A positive MEE would lead people to prefer the one that had been pre-exposed.  A negative MEE would be the opposite.

In the first study we found that most of our predictions held true, particularly for extrasensory effects, and particularly when the participants were in a positive mood.  To make things simpler and tidier for the second study, we reduced our finding to the strongest ones and predicted that they would be found again.  When an effect can be replicated in a new sample, in an independent study, we can be more confident that the effect is a real one.

Based upon these strongest results, for subliminal effects we expected that response would be predicted by the person’s scores on Need for Cognition, interest in subtle experiences, and boredom proneness.  For ESP, we thought that Openness to Fantasy, Tolerance for Closeness, and Vulnerability to Anxiety would be especially important.  And we also expected that these effects would be strongest when participants were in a positive mood, and when the pictures were more emotionally important because they contained human content as compared to pictures about non-human things.

In this second study we found a clear pattern of results.  All our predictions about ESP were confirmed strongly – but none of our predictions about subliminal effects were confirmed.  We found virtually no evidence of a response to subliminal sensory exposures, but plenty of response to the extrasensory pictures.  This may seem an ironic finding for people who think that extrasensory perception is unlikely to be real, or (as some have argued in the past), might just be subliminal sensory effects that experimenters were too careless to avoid.  Ironic or not, it is what we found.

In a nutshell, we found that people are more likely to respond in a positive emotional way to extrasensory information if they are typically open to their inner life of fantasy, if they are relatively free from painfully disorganizing anxiety, and if they are comfortable with closeness with other people.  On the other hand, people who are more closed to their fantasy life, more subject to painful anxiety and who draw tighter emotional boundaries with other people are likely to turn away from extrasensory material and unconsciously avoid it. And these considerations are more effective when the person is in a positive mood and the information in question is emotionally important. These are all the predictions of First Sight theory, and this replication adds to our confidence that these hypotheses are correct.

In his review of the book Yoga and Parapsychology:  Empirical Research and Theoretical Studies, edited by K. R. Rao, Dr. Jerry Solfvin pays special attention to a chapter by James Carpenter that summarizes some central aspects of his First Sight model of psi.  Solfvin points out that the non-dualistic stance of the First Sight model puts it deeply in tune with Indian philosophy and psychology.

As he says, “A great discovery here is just how closely attuned Carpenter’s thinking is with the Hindu Vedas. Carpenter’s first sight conception of human nature is, “each person is not contained within personal, physical boundaries, but ontologically and epistemologically extends beyond that into intimate commerce with all the rest of reality, including all other persons” (p. 99). And like the Hindu scriptures, Carpenter’s model does not deal with (or even concern itself with) “proof of the existence of psi. Neither does he try to solve the problem of the connection between mind and body – rather, “the split between them is not assumed to begin with” (p. 72). By not assuming the separation, he has no conceptual problem with the “possibility” of psi phenomena.

This is nondualism, which is at the core of many East-West misunderstandings regarding mind and spirit. Stated simply, western dualists tend to forget/ignore that “separation” is an assumption that is added on. Or, as Carpenter phrases it, “In a phenomenological approach, a dualistic split between the subjective and objective aspects of experience is eschewed, and the need for providing some sort of physical mechanism linking mind to world or present to future event is avoided” (pp. 100-101). This key foundational brick is right out of the Hindu Advaita Vedanta (= nondual philosophy) , even though Carpenter is not a Hindu devotee, nor even an Indophile.”

Rao’s whole book is an attempt to build a bridge between Western and Indian psychology, and according to Solfvin, the First Sight model may provide the ideal foundation for that effort.  Carpenter came to his own approach not through study of Hindu scriptures but by way of European phenomenology and existential philosophy and psychology.  The fact that this thinking is itself attuned to Hindu thought has been spelled out by the Swiss existential psychiatrist Medard Boss, in his work A Psychiatrist Discovers India. 

If you want to read all of Solfvin’s review of Rao’s book, you can find it here.