Proof of the Paranormal?

Putting "exceptionally accurate mediums" to the test

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I had an email exchange with Professor Susan Blackmore recently. She had read an essay I wrote, published by the Essentia Foundation, entitled Materialism in Academia is a Fundamentalist Belief System, wherein I suggested that our consciousness is capable of continuation after death. She agreed that Materialism is greatly lacking as a metaphysics for our time, but she also made sure she pointed out that this does not imply that paranormal phenomena, such as communication with the dead or psychic capacities, are real. I agree.

The jettisoning of Materialism as a worldview does not imply that, although I argue that it allows for that. However, having had an extraordinary number of paranormal experiences that have made me as sure as a scientist can be about anything, I wanted to get her opinion on one of the myriad reasons I believe in paranormal phenomena with near certainty.

I told her about one of the astonishing experiences I’ve had with my partner, who is a professional psychic medium. He and I play the New York Times game Wordle together. He will psychically obtain two or three letters every morning, tell them to me, and we try to come up with the word together. Out of the 578 games we’ve played, we’ve “guessed” the word correctly on the first attempt 74 times (See Figure 1). If you're not familiar with the game, there are six attempts to guess the five-letter word of the day. Talk to anyone who has played this game for a long time; they will tell you that they have been able to guess the word on the first attempt, maybe once out of many hundreds of games, if that.

So, doing it 74 times is clearly far out of the normal performance range. To see how far out of normal this is, we can perform a simple statistical probability on the data. Given that Wordle allows for a possible 2315 solution words (there are actually many more words that it will allow, on the order of nearly 13000, but we will focus on the solution words), the probability of getting the solution word on the first try is 1/2315. When you take our results, the chance of getting the word on the first try 74/578 times is 4.68×10^-155. This probability is so low it may as well be zero.

Extraordinary Statistics

So I told her about this and asked her what she thought about it, on the assumption that there was no fraud (which, of course, only my partner and I can know for sure there wasn’t). This was her response:

Thanks for writing and telling me about these extraordinary statistics. All I can say is that this is an eminently testable claim. If you want to prove the reality of paranormal phenomena to others (as I once did long ago!), then this Wordle effect would be a brilliant way of doing so. My guess would be that if you were to do a well-designed experiment, the effect would disappear. If it remained there, under controlled conditions, then I would have to change my mind about psychic claims.

When I asked her why she thought the effect would disappear under controlled conditions, she answered:

I think it would disappear because it was never a paranormal effect in the first place. Otherwise, you have to come up with some kind of theory. You would have to think up some reason why the effect appeared when you did it informally and why it did not stand up to controlled testing.

I found her response fascinating and indicative of much that is wrong when it comes to our attempts to discover whether psychic and other paranormal phenomena are real. The conclusion that the Wordle effect is not paranormal because it would disappear under controlled conditions is an illogical and erroneous conclusion. And if Professor Blackmore was genuinely interested in knowing the truth about these phenomena, she should be highly aware of that.

I can think of very good reasons why the effect appeared when done informally and why it may not stand up to controlled testing of the type she has performed. To understand this, we should take a look at how she performed her experiments, which led her to conclude that psychic phenomena are not real. Her method was to test psychic ability in a couple of different ways, including tarot reading and picture guessing, by utilizing either herself and some friends, a group of children, or her students as subjects. In her few years of testing this way, she didn't find a robust effect and concluded that psychic phenomena don’t exist.

There are many issues here to critique, which others have done (See, for example, Rick E. Berger's A Critical Examination of the Blackmore Psi Experiments, The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 83, April 1989, 123-144). But rather than focusing on how well-designed her experiments were and what the actual findings were, I want to focus on the problem of attempting to discover these abilities through standard methods of controlled experimentation.

Breaking the Four-minute Mile

Image: Roger Bannister, qz.com

To provide an analogy, let's say it’s 1954, and we want to discover whether someone can run a four-minute mile. We hear a rumor that there is someone in England who was able to do that, but we’re very incredulous, and we want to test the hypothesis ourselves. So we take a bunch of fifth graders and have them run around the elementary school track. We find that no one is capable of doing it, so we conclude it can’t be done. I don’t feel like this analogy is far off when it comes to testing paranormal ability.

I’ve seen first hand on a daily basis clients coming out of a session with my partner, often with tears in their eyes, exclaiming, “Oh my God, there’s no way he could have known that!” You hear that day after day for a couple of years and have countless personal experiences of that caliber, and it becomes undeniable. That is my life. My partner is exceptional, as are others like him. They are the ones who can run the four-minute mile. When the subjects in Prof. Blackmore’s experiments are undergraduate students, herself and her friends, or a group of children with no evidence of psychic capacity, it's going to be highly unlikely that you’re testing anyone remotely capable of showing a robust statistical effect.

Further, it might be helpful to go to them, not have them come to you. Take our British four-minute miler. Let's say you realized that maybe testing the fifth graders wasn’t the best way of assessing the accuracy of the claim (Professor Blackmore never even got that far). So you send for the person who allegedly can run the four-minute mile, bring him into your elementary school, and have him run around with the fifth graders on the school blacktop.

There are no competitors, the track is nothing like he’s used to, and you made him do it when he had jet lag. You’re probably not going to get the effect. Although you will be quite convinced that he stands out amongst fifth graders. So maybe you realize you should go to his home turf, where he was known to have run a four-minute mile, and have him try again under those circumstances. You take your own timer, and you make sure it’s perfectly accurate. And then you time him. He does it. Now you’ve seen it with your own eyes.

Living with a psychic, I’ve seen how context-dependent the ability is. It often requires a connection to another person and a deep desire to help. They don’t just sit around guessing who’s going to win the tennis match, or seeing what the lottery numbers are, or knowing what card you’re looking at. My partner is not good at those things. I doubt that he would even perform well on Wordle outside of the context where it is a fun game for the two of us to play and connect over. In fact, it’s very strange. While he is almost never wrong about the two to three letters he picks up every morning, he almost never picks up on the whole word. Somehow, the two of us doing it together, with a lot of my input as well, is what gets us there.

Tough to Test in a Lab

This would appear to be very difficult to test under controlled conditions in a lab, but that obviously does not make his and our capacity unreal. I would tell the researcher, such as Professor Blackmore, to go to the psychic and “test” him or her under their normal working conditions. Psychics and mediums are vetted now. Do a little research and you can find the exceptional ones. I can almost guarantee that if she were to spend as much time going to numerous highly regarded and top-reviewed psychic mediums with an open mind and a genuine desire for evidence as she did testing nonpsychic subjects in her lab, she would find evidence for the paranormal. I say almost guarantee because some people are so closed off to believing in these abilities that they can actually convince themselves they are not real in the face of extraordinary evidence.

As a neuroscientist, analytic philosopher, former (and now recovering) Materialist, and highly skeptical person myself, I was in need of such extraordinary evidence. I did not want to be duped, so I took it upon myself to obtain proof that would satisfy me. Here’s one of the ways I did it at the beginning of my journey to discover the truth about these abilities. (For another way, please see my essay published by the Essentia Foundation entitled How a Neuroscientist Came to Embrace the Reality of Acausal Synchronicities).

When I “lost” my dear friend and colleague to suicide in 2019, I was devastated but also somehow excited, as I felt he was still around me. In order to corroborate all the experiences I was having I sought out some of the best mediums I could find. I wanted proof. I went to three mediums who were suggested to me. They all had exceptional records and reviews, and through them, I found absolutely convincing corroboration (in the form of things there was no way they could have guessed) that I was right and he was still around me.

Even so, that wasn’t quite enough for my conditioned skeptic’s mind. So, on occasion, I took it further by “testing” the mediums in certain very specific ways. As just one example of how I did this, the night before one of my readings, I was having a conversation with my dead friend. I had put some new toenail polish on and I wasn’t sure whether the color looked good. So I asked him to let the medium know whether he liked the toenail polish or not and to have her tell me. The next day, I had my reading with the medium, and here is an exact quote from her that day:

Do you have new toenail polish on”? He likes the toenail polish. What a left turn. Big left turn. Let’s go with maybe it’s the toenail polish; he likes it.

Even she was utterly confused by what she was saying. But mediums are trained to say what comes to them, even if it seems very off-track and arbitrary.

This is the kind of evidence that some exceptional mediums are capable of obtaining. They are known as evidential mediums. These are not people who are just saying things like, “Your father is sorry and says he loves you.” These are people who can pick up on the most obscure personal things that only the sitter would possibly be able to know about. My partner does this on a daily basis for people, many of whom relate to me what happened after their reading, their eyes wide and with smiles on their faces, looking completely transformed from when they first came into the house.

Has Professor Blackmore ever tried to obtain this kind of evidence? I doubt it. Maybe she hasn’t had enough of a desire or need to obtain it for herself. Admittedly, what I have is anecdotal evidence, albeit so much anecdotal evidence that I have become convinced without a doubt. If the Prof. Blackmores of the world and her fellow skeptical colleagues would explore and discover their own anecdotal evidence with complete dedication, we would begin to have data that many would find convincing because they’re being gathered by true skeptics.

But Prof. Blackmore, by her own admission, stopped really looking into the phenomena 20 years ago, so it would appear she is no longer willing to explore these possibilities, having closed her mind to their reality. Sadly, when others come forward with their own anecdotes like Bernardo Kastrup did in a recent dialogue with Prof. Blackmore, she exclaimed to the world that he just can’t be right about what he has experienced. Bernardo and the rest of us should not believe her.

An Exceptionally Accurate Medium

Image: Leonora Piper, ranker.com

William James discusses similar “anecdotal” evidence to what I’ve discovered with respect to evidential mediumship. He was very intrigued by claims about a woman named Leonora Piper, who had been touted as an exceptionally accurate medium. Not taking anyone else’s word for it, he studied her himself. He came away with enough striking evidence to fully believe in her capability. He called her his “white crow”. Some phenomena are not proved through controlled experimentation. It is enough to disprove the hypothesis that all crows are black by finding one white crow. And this is the heart of the matter. I’ve been lucky to have strong doses of both skepticism and desire to have as much certainty as possible that through my own lengthy exploration, I was able to discover an entire murder of white crows.

So, to the final point, testing the hypothesis that paranormal abilities exist by doing “controlled” experiments in a lab setting is not necessary and is not going to get the naysayers to believe in it anyway, even if an effect is found. I know because I was one of those skeptical naysayers for most of my scientific life. I read numerous studies on psychic phenomena and mediumship prior to having my own experiences, many of which showed significant effects. While I found them exciting and hopeful, they did not fully convince me of the reality of paranormal phenomena.

It was not until my own personal experiences reached a threshold of indubitability that I was able to have full conviction. To rely on standard scientific experimentation will not get us far enough. And it’s unclear where this dictate comes from anyway. I believe we are clinging to this stricture because the materialist scientists have determined for us that the only way anyone should ever believe in the paranormal is to do controlled laboratory studies proving it. In my opinion, we’ve caved far too much into this demand from those who would refuse to believe in the phenomena even if statistically significant results are found. We don’t have to be beholden to what a Materialist or Prof. Blackmore takes to be necessary for us to believe in these phenomena.

I don’t expect to convince anyone through this essay that paranormal phenomena exist. That isn’t what this is about. What it is about is that we shouldn’t let people like Professor Blackmore dictate to the rest of us what is real when they haven’t done the proper work. There is much at stake here. Continuation of consciousness after death and the ability to have access to information heretofore thought impossible to reach means reality is much more meaningful and marvelous than is currently believed. And that we are much more connected to each other than we currently understand. The knowledge that these phenomena are real can and will provide much deeper meaning and hope to our deeply dysfunctional secular Materialist world.

Figure 1

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