The Telepathy Tapes

[Ann K]

Nearly every ganzfield experiment that has ever been conducted achieves a signal greater than the expected value of 25%. So yes, if you ran an auto-ganzfield, it would in fact replicate.

If the expected value is 25%, that means that they're only choosing among four symbols. It's very easy to get runs that are higher than 25%. The question remains about the methods of applying the test. Were all results reported? Were some poor results rejected because of one reason or another, such as the subject being distracted, or "not feeling up to the task today"? We simply have no way to know that. When the believers are running the whole shebang, there is a bias toward getting positive results, whether that bias is recognized or unrecognized. Some researchers (and some subjects) may be charlatans, some may be earnest seekers of the truth; nevertheless if the results cannot be verified independently under strict conditions, our skepticism is warranted.

 

[Gaspa]

The problem that I point out is what these people mean by "doesn't replicate", is actually more like: "it has an effect size better than some medicines, but it's not to my satisfaction because I'm a materialist skeptic."

This mindset is exactly wrong and unscientific.

Nothing wrong OR unscientific with taking prior probabilities into account, which includes the fact that magical thinking tends to lead to poor reasoning as well as past demonstrations of fraud, poor control setups and several forms of confirmation bias on the part of parapsychologists and other proponents of this sort of fantasy.

Ever heard of "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"? The fact that some experiment with an expected hit rate of 25% often gets slightly higher values, and sometimes gets much higher values isn't extraordinary.

 

[FatPhil]

That paper doesn't do any statistical analysis, and their meta-analysis section has a single reference. Their denial comes in the form that I specified above (that psi breaks 'laws').

Goalpost moving detected.

 

[eleggua]

And anyway, even if one facilitator had morals, or simply wasn't indoctrinated into the dark arts of the technique yet, and doesn't influence his ward, that doesn't mean the field isn't discredited. It's been designed to be abusable, which means it's *broken by design*.

Echoes of "muscle testing".
https://www.painscience.com/articles/applied-kinesiology.php
Applied kinesiology muscle testing is a bizarre alternative medicine method of diagnosis and prescription. (It has nothing to do with actual kinesiology, the study of human movement.) It's based on the idea that fluctuations in muscle strength reveal patient sensitivities and needs, reacting to probing questions or substances placed within the body's energy field. AK is too ridiculous to have ever been studied scientifically, and has been properly debunked: it's based on well-documented illusions and psychology, particularly the ideomotor effect.

 

[FatPhil]

Your response is funny. Nearly every ganzfield experiment that has ever been conducted achieves a signal greater than the expected value of 25%. So yes, if you ran an auto-ganzfield, it would in fact replicate. Even skeptics like Susan Blackmore replicate ganzfield.

Ganzfelt's known bunk.

Writing in 1985, C. E. M. Hansel discovered weaknesses in the design and possibilities of sensory leakage in the ganzfeld experiments reported by Carl Sargent and other parapsychologists. Hansel concluded the ganzfeld studies had not been independently replicated and that "ESP is no nearer to being established than it was a hundred years ago."

David Marks in his book The Psychology of the Psychic (2000) has noted that during the autoganzfeld experiments the experimenter sat only fourteen feet from the sender's room. Soundproofing tiles were eventually added but they were designed to "absorb sound not to prevent transmission." According to Marks this was inadequate and no different than using any standard internal wall. The door and door frame were also a possible source of sensory leakage and none of these problems were ever eliminated.[5]

Terence Hines wrote in 2003 that the ganzfeld studies could not be said to provide evidence for psi as the alleged evidence disappears as the tightness of experimental controls is increased. As research progresses variables in science become clearer as more studies are published that describe under what specific condition the particular effect can be demonstrated. This is in opposition to the ganzfeld studies. According to Hines, there was "no clear way to obtain results showing any psychic phenomenon reliably" and that "the most reasonable conclusion" was that the effect did not exist and had never existed.[37]

So, it's bad science. And bad science is not science. The scientists think it's bunk, in particular they think the psi researchers are seemingly incapable of performing experiments without potential bias.

Specifically, auto-ganzfelt?

Hyman analyzed these experiments and wrote they met most, but not all of the "stringent standards" of the joint communiqué.[22] He expressed concerns with the randomization procedure, the reliability of which he was not able to confirm based on the data provided by Honorton's collaborator, Daryl Bem. Hyman further noted that although the overall hit rate of 32% (7% higher than the 25% expectation from randomness) was significant, the hit rate for static targets (pictures) was, in fact, consistent with random and therefore inconsistent with Honorton's previous claims of positive results from the ganzfeld experiments that were conducted prior to 1982.

There's a word for only satisfying "most but not all of the stringent standards", and that's "broken".

And Blackmore? I've always considered her tainted. She started in woo, and even though skeptical groups welcomed her with open arms when she came out as being a skeptic, that's worth nothing - c.f. atheist groups and Hirsi-Ali.

EDIT: quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment

 

[metac3]

auto-ganzfelt

And now we are back to the very first paper I posted and which comes right after that part of the wikipedia article you're quoting from.

Contemporary research

The ganzfeld experiment has continued to be refined over the years. In its current incarnation, an automated computer system is used to select and display the targets ("digital autoganzfeld").

From these experiments we get:

In 2010, Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Di Risio analyzed 29 ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008. Of the 1,498 trials, 483 produced hits, corresponding to a hit rate of 32.2%. This hit rate is statistically significant with p < .001.

And the rebuttal paper to that result, is the one that I linked to in the first place, and which still finds the 300 to 1 signal. Exactly as I described. And their conclusion for not establishing PSI? It's not that psi doesn't replicate (It obviously does even to it's detractors), it's that, and I quote:

lack of any plausible mechanism

But that:

for the reader who may believe a priori that psi is as likely to exist as not to exist, a Bayes factor of 330 to 1 is considerable

In other words, if you do science correctly, without bias, there's no reason to deny psi being an established effect in line with all other effect based research.

 

[FatPhil]

But that:

> for the reader who may believe a priori that psi is as likely to exist as not to exist, a Bayes factor of 330 to 1 is considerable

In other words, if you do science correctly, without bias, there's no reason to deny psi being an established effect in line with all other effect based research.

However, I would say that anyone who think that psi is as likely to exist as not to exist are people who have never paid any attention to any science at all, and their opinions can be dismissed immediately. I genuinely don't care what an ignoramus thinks about these things. I care what Richard Wiseman thinks about these things. He does the the experiments, he concludes there's no effect. Those who do the science *correctly* repeatedly deny psi being an established effect. Almost every pro-psi result has come from a flawed experiment. It's almost as if they're deliberately doing the science badly it happens so often.

The lack of million-dollar Randi cheques is a testament to the reproducability, or otherwise, of these effects.

 

[deirdre]

i've uploaded a video of one of their tests here, seems pretty clear that akil is not being manipulated, and that the random word generator generated some pretty sufficiently random stuff:
https://limewire.com/?referrer=pq7i8xx7p2

@deirdre @Ann K

@Charlesinsandiego Dr. Dianne Hennacy Powell

thank you for the upload, but i dont click links i never heard of from people i dont know.

is there a documentary somewhere where you got that footage from? in other words, where is your original source? <honest query, id like to see if there is other footage.


ultimately i agree with other commenters in this thread, i still see the moms, so far, very potentially prompting the experiments unfortunately.

 

[deirdre]

The lack of million-dollar Randi cheques is a testament to the reproducability, or otherwise, of these effects.

for the record, the set up of the Randi show (and it was a show, with audience and lights etc) is bs. that set up is just as disingenuous as the tv psychics.

the thumbs down wasnt because of randi, it was for calling metac an ignoramus.

 

[tinkertailor]

the facilitated communication argument does not hold up for "akil" who types independently on an ipad keyboard. @Gaspa

As a speech pathology grad student who has read just about everything published on FC ever and is very familiar with nonspeaking clients/students, I suspect this is due to 'prompt dependency.'

Basically, he couldn't do this without subtle prompts from his "communication and regulation partner" (the person who helps him type) even though he's not being physically prompted with touch.

I have yet to watch the whole thing (grad students aren't known for free time), so if you provide a time stamp I can more easily discuss this with you.

I'll jump on this in earnest once I get my boring school chores done!!

 

[Mick West]

Your response is funny. Nearly every ganzfield experiment that has ever been conducted achieves a signal greater than the expected value of 25%. So yes, if you ran an auto-ganzfield, it would in fact replicate. Even skeptics like Susan Blackmore replicate ganzfield.

She does not seem to think there's evidence for ESP.

Article:

In his article, Vyse's gives a quote from an interview in Slate magazine in which Bem describes his experiments as 'rhetorical devices' and says he didn't worry about replication. 'I gathered data to show how my point would be made. I used data as a point of persuasion.' This, chillingly, reminded me of Carl Sargent telling me that it wouldn't matter if some experiments were unreliable because we know that psi exists.

But it does matter. It matters that Sargent's experiments were seriously flawed. It matters that Bem included these data in his meta-analysis without referencing the doubt cast on them. It matters because Bem's continued claims mislead a willing public into believing that there is reputable scientific evidence for ESP in the Ganzfeld when there is not.

Source: https://www.susanblackmore.uk/daryl-bem-psi-ganzfeld/

 

[FatPhil]

for the record, the set up of the Randi show (and it was a show, with audience and lights etc) is bs. that set up is just as disingenuous as the tv psychics.

the thumbs down wasnt because of randi, it was for calling metac an ignoramus.

To me Randi was the figurehead for an educational foundation, I didn't even know he had a television show, popular culture frivolities are ofvery little interest to me.

I wasn't calling metac an ignoramus, I was calling people who consider the truth of psi to be equally likely as its falsity ignoramuses - because they are literally ignorant of science. It's not an insult, it's just a description.

 

[analiennamed]

Her left hand is giving him the cues.

I get that her very presence and movement opens up that possibility. But being able to quickly spell complex words, numbers, describe pictures, instantly from gestures?? Seems like a stretch to me. Especially if the kid is mentally disabled. Do you think you could train yourself to pick the right letters and words 100% of the time from similar gestures? Does she have a spot on her body for every letter in the alphabet? If she gestures to go left after the first letter, how many other options are there for him to make a wrong selection? I understand there is room for doubt but that seems like a silly argument to me.

 

[tinkertailor]

the initial critique i've heard is that these non verbal autistic folks are being assisted in their communication, via "spelling" (pointing to letters on a board), and therefor are being manipulated. this argument doesn't hold water in my opinion because many of the spellers go on to become autonomous, and require no physical touch in order to assist their spelling, so physical manipulation doesn't appear to be a culprit

Physical touch is not the only type of support you can give someone, these typers are still being supported. When I work with kids I never touch them (unless to play or provide sensory input), but I've taught kids to pronounce sounds they couldn't say and think of words they have forgotten, among many many more. I've worked with adults who lost their ability to spell after having a stroke, and I never touched them but they still learned how to spell target words. We change the way we ask questions (yes/no is easier than multiple choice, which is easier than fill-in-the-blank, which is easier than wh-questions, etc), use gestures, model how to do things, and more--largely without touching any client. That doesn't mean they're independent yet.

Also, if another person is holding the letterboard or iPad as is common in the current FC styles, they are usually moving the board to meet the speller's finger.

I've had many many nonspeaking clients who use their devices to independently ask for something (I want __, I need __) because a previous therapist only worked on that. They can't name objects or describe something or comment, though.

There are very few absolutes in communication, especially with nonspeaking folks. "Not being touched" doesn't necessarily equate to independence. I find these nuances are often lost with FC proponents.

 

[Gaspa]

I get that her very presence and movement opens up that possibility. But being able to quickly spell complex words, numbers, describe pictures, instantly from gestures?? Seems like a stretch to me. Especially if the kid is mentally disabled. Do you think you could train yourself to pick the right letters and words 100% of the time from similar gestures? Does she have a spot on her body for every letter in the alphabet? If she gestures to go left after the first letter, how many other options are there for him to make a wrong selection? I understand there is room for doubt but that seems like a silly argument to me.

What I saw in the video was not complex at all. It's just one letter at a time.
Slight cues worked for clever Hans. Why would you deem it unlikely in a slightly more complex form for humans who, usually, have been spending most of their time "practicing" this?

 

[tinkertailor]

I get that her very presence and movement opens up that possibility. But being able to quickly spell complex words, numbers, describe pictures, instantly from gestures?? Seems like a stretch to me. Especially if the kid is mentally disabled. Do you think you could train yourself to pick the right letters and words 100% of the time from similar gestures? Does she have a spot on her body for every letter in the alphabet? If she gestures to go left after the first letter, how many other options are there for him to make a wrong selection? I understand there is room for doubt but that seems like a silly argument to me.

First off: intelligence and expressive vocabulary are not the same. At all. I worked with some students recently in a school, and most my sessions I had them teach me things about them and their cultures and lives. I learned so much from them. This is pretty foundational to discussing people with language difficulties so that's why I'm making this clear.

Second off: we didn't know how long this kid has worked with this facilitator. Kids are crazy receptive. I once had a student make crazy progress in this one assessment I was giving her. We were working on synonyms, identifying synonyms for grade-level words out of a field of 2, then 3, then 5. She was getting them all right but couldn't tell me how they were right, which was weird. My supervisor later told me she was looking at me the whole time she picked, and when I watched my recorded session I realized my left eyebrow twitched involuntarily when I pointed to the right answer. She picked up on it, but I didn't.

Kids are insanely smart, especially when they want to impress adults.

 

[metac3]

I care what Richard Wiseman thinks about these things.

Wiseman is egregiously bad faith. There's no other conclusion one can draw from this 5 minute read. For years he denied his data replicated Sheldrake's: https://www.sheldrake.org/reactions...m-to-have-debunked-the-psychic-pet-phenomenon

I was astonished to hear that in the summer of 1996 Wiseman went to a series of conferences, including the World Skeptics Congress, announcing that he had refuted the "psychic pet" phenomenon. He said Jaytee had failed his tests because he had gone to the window before Pam set off to come home. In September 1996, I met Wiseman and pointed out that his data showed the same pattern as my own, and that far from refuting the effect I had observed, his results confirmed it. I gave him copies of graphs showing my own data and the data from the experiments that he and Smith conducted with Jaytee. But he ignored these facts.

Wiseman reiterated his negative conclusions in a paper in the British Journal of Psychology, coauthored with Smith and Julie Milton, in August, 1998.

That was his ego getting in the way of science, but eventually he admitted it.

Although Wiseman claimed for many years that his tests refuted the "psychic pet phenomenon", in an interview with Alex Tsakiris on April 17, 2007, he finally admitted, "I don't think there's any debate that the patterning in my studies is the same as the patterning in Rupert's studies...It's how they are interpreted." (From 4-17-07 "Interview on Skeptiko.com"

So he attempted to provide an alternative explanation, but it was dead on arrival as control experiments had already been conducted which ruled out his alternative.

In 2011, Wiseman posted a new article on the Jaytee controversy on his web site, in which he retreated from his claim to have refuted the "psychic pet phenomenon," and instead argued that the experimental results could be explained in terms of what he called an "anxiety" hypothesis. However, he could only do this by ignoring data that already refute this hypothesis. In a series of control tests when Pam was not coming home during the test period, there was no sign of "anxiety" with jaytee going to the window more and more as time went one (Figure 3).

If you read that article, there is no way you will still think he's a good faith actor. If in your reply you mean to simply call Sheldrake mean names, don't bother responding please. Engage substantively, or not at all.

 

[Edward Current]

I get that her very presence and movement opens up that possibility. But being able to quickly spell complex words, numbers, describe pictures, instantly from gestures?? Seems like a stretch to me. Especially if the kid is mentally disabled. Do you think you could train yourself to pick the right letters and words 100% of the time from similar gestures? Does she have a spot on her body for every letter in the alphabet? If she gestures to go left after the first letter, how many other options are there for him to make a wrong selection? I understand there is room for doubt but that seems like a silly argument to me.

Clever Hans wants his tricks back. And that was a horse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

 

[Gaspa]

Wiseman is egregiously bad faith. There's no other conclusion one can draw from this 5 minute read. For years he denied his data replicated Sheldrake's: https://www.sheldrake.org/reactions...m-to-have-debunked-the-psychic-pet-phenomenon

That was his ego getting in the way of science, but eventually he admitted it.

So he attempted to provide an alternative explanation, but it was dead on arrival as control experiments had already been conducted which ruled out his alternative.

If you read that article, there is no way you will still think he's a good faith actor. If in your reply you mean to simply call Sheldrake mean names, don't bother responding please. Engage substantively, or not at all.

You make claims, but the quotes you provide are not evidence for them.

 

[FatPhil]

If you read that article, there is no way you will still think he's a good faith actor. If in your reply you mean to simply call Sheldrake mean names, don't bother responding please. Engage substantively, or not at all.

N=12

 

[metac3]

N=12

The topic was Wiseman being egregiously bad faith in his reporting in order to preserve his a priori assumption, as you said you would trust his opinion. Nice misdirection attempt though. And I take it as a tacit admission that his behavior is that of a bad faith actor, that you made no effort to excuse his behavior and tried changing the topic to the paper.

 

[FatPhil]

The topic was Wiseman being bad faith in his reporting. Nice misdirection attempt though. Such tactics won't work on me.

Wiseman makes the same claims about bad faith against Sheldrake. The experiments had repeated goalpost moving, because the data that was gathered did not support PS's and RS's desired outcome - that datapoint doesn't count as .... the neighbour's dog was on heat! Gimme a break, that's cherry picking. What RS did wasn't science - he decided how to analyse the data *after* it had been collected.

http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/psychicdogreply.pdf

And how precise was RS's post-hoc analysis?

There
are some important discrepancies between the book and paper. For example, in the
paper, the trial which took place on the 11/2/97 is classified as an 'early' trial, whilst in
the book it is classified as 'late'. In the paper, the trial on the 1/7/97 is classified as
'late', whereas in the book it is classified as 'early'. In addition, some of the data
patterns appear different in the two sources. In the paper, the data from the trial on the
19/3/97 shows Jaytee spending very little time at the porch in the early part of the trial,
whereas in the book he spends a considerable amount of time there. Likewise, in the
paper, the trial on the 21/9/97 shows a spike in Jaytee's activity that appears to be
missing from the corresponding graph in the book.

http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/Jaytee.pdf

 

[metac3]

You said that you took the opinion of Wiseman seriously, presumably because you thought he could give neutral valid analysis. I showed that his analysis is either so bad that it takes him nearly a decade to recognize an error, or he is so bias that he refused to admit his data matched even when it did. And we don't have to take a third party's assessment that his data matched as he himself admitted it:

"I don't think there's any debate that the patterning in my studies is the same as the patterning in Rupert's studies...It's how they are interpreted." (From 4-17-07 "Interview on Skeptiko.com"

Of course, by that point he'd been saying the opposite for years. This egregious behavior of failing to admit to something which was so obviously true (his data matching RS), for so long, shows that Wiseman is bad faith definitively.

And Wiseman got what he wanted in the end, and what his bad faith behavior was really in service towards:

"Pets have no sixth sense, say scientists" (The Independent, Aug 21) and "Psychic pets are exposed as a myth" (The Daily Telegraph, Aug 22)

 

[Ann K]

Especially if the kid is mentally disabled.

We don't know if he is mentally disabled any more than we know that he is of superior intelligence. What we know is that he has great difficulty communicating with others.

 

[FatPhil]

You make claims, but the quotes you provide are not evidence for them.

He's right that Wiseman appears a bit shirty about the whole case, but if you read the two pdfs I linked to, you'll see he's got good reason to be. (The former one was the contemporaneous rebuttal, the latter one is more a retrospective. Reading the latter, you'll start to imagine sighs of frustration.)

 

[jimmyslippin]

I get that her very presence and movement opens up that possibility. But being able to quickly spell complex words, numbers, describe pictures, instantly from gestures?? Seems like a stretch to me. Especially if the kid is mentally disabled. Do you think you could train yourself to pick the right letters and words 100% of the time from similar gestures? Does she have a spot on her body for every letter in the alphabet? If she gestures to go left after the first letter, how many other options are there for him to make a wrong selection? I understand there is room for doubt but that seems like a silly argument to me.

You have to ask yourself the question, why is the mother unnecessarily moving around so much, and why do her movements coincide with each letter Akhil selects? She is seen doing this in both of the videos I've seen where they are demonstrating this particular technique.

The second question you need to ask is am I only being shown carefully selected material? How many times was this "experiment" repeated, and did they only show the most successful attempts? There is a caption in your video saying there were dozens of tests, but they are only making a "small sample" available now. Will we get an unedited, uninterrupted video of Akhil in the same setting performing the same task at least a dozen times in a row where we can monitor both his and his mother's behaviour and movements to see if any patterns emerge? Somehow I doubt it.

So is Akhil actually selecting the right letters and words 100% of the time? In the video I posted he made an error and the mother physically poked him in the back. Why did she feel the need to do this? Would he have corrected his error without his mother poking him? How many other errors did he make in the "dozens" of tests Ky Dickens claims that performed? We just don't know, and the mother's presence is a giant red flag in all of these videos.

As for whether someone could be trained to pick up subtle physical cues to accurately select letters and words, my answer to that is YES, ABSOLUTELY. It is commonplace in stage magic and mentalism routines, and can be honed to an art over years of practice. Akhil and his mother have been at this for over ten years.

 

[jimmyslippin]

is there a documentary somewhere where you got that footage from? in other words, where is your original source? <honest query, id like to see if there is other footage.

These videos come from the Telepathy Tapes website. But you gotta sign up and hand over $9.99 to watch them. No thanks.

@analiennamed I understand there's a video where Akhil performs a test while his mother is in a separate room. Are you able to provide that one?

ultimately i agree with other commenters in this thread, i still see the moms, so far, very potentially prompting the experiments unfortunately.

The mothers have an undeniable influence in all of the videos I've seen so far. As I pointed out before, Houston and his mother are using RPM, and you can clearly see in the video that the mother is positioning the board each time so the symbol needed is closest to the pointed pencil in Houston's hand. If the symbol is on the top row of the stencil she holds it low. If it's on the bottom row she holds it high. If it's on the left she holds the stencil closer to herself. If it's on the right she holds it further away. It's clearly a product of facilitator induced responses that RPM is known for. To further highlight how ridiculous this is, Houston can actually verbalise the symbols using his own voice, and does so as he "selects" them on the stencil. So why is the mother even needed to hold a stencil at all?

Then there's Mia, who is blindfolded while performing different tests. In one, she sorts coloured popsticks into different piles. In another, a coloured ball is placed in front of her while blindfolded, and then afterwards she types its colour. In both of these tests Mia's mother has her hand placed directly across Mia's forehead!

 

[Charlie Wiser]

I paid the $9.99 and uploaded all the "raw" footage provided by the Telepathy Tapes. It's an unlisted YouTube video and I'll provide the link to anyone who DMs me here.

 

[Charlie Wiser]

the facilitated communication argument does not hold up for "akil" who types independently on an ipad keyboard. @Gaspa

It would seem from the footage provided that Akhil is able to type his thoughts independently. The kids profiled are all assumed to be highly competent (and telepathic) but the reality is that non-verbal people have a range of intellectual capability just like the rest of us.

So, we apparently see Akhil type some stuff independently (outside of the telepathy tests). But during the tests, his mother is always present, always moving in weird jerky movements making what look like hand signals, and she talks a lot as well. It would be a simple matter to control for this (put a screen between her and her son) but that's not done. Why not?

This simple control should have been used for all the tests - just blindfold the facilitator so she can't see the screen to which her child is pointing. This can be done to determine who is authoring the messages, whether or not telepathy is being tested for. (The presenter Ky Dickens scoffs at the idea the children aren't communicating - she uses the term "presumed competence" a lot, meaning one should simply accept they are communicating.)

The "discredited" form of facilitated communication involves holding the child's arm. The FC shown in the TTapes modifies the technique so the facilitator holds the board in the air. Why? Why not place it on a stable surface? I overlaid 7 tests with Houston who is telepathically reading the card from his mother's mind (she looks at the card, then he indicates the number on the board, which is where I took the screenshot). She is clearly moving the board between each trial (it is retracted then replaced each time). She denied to me that she was moving it (she doesn't realize she's doing it), and stopped responding when I posted this image. Note that Houston clearly articulates the number each time he touches it. If he can speak, why use the board at all for this test?

 

[Charlie Wiser]

For education and critique: This is Akhil spelling CROCODILE. If his mother is indicating the letters with hand signals, he's getting them one at a time (rather than "seeing" a crocodile in her mind via telepathy). This could explain his laugh, halfway through, as he realizes what the full word is. (The low quality is because the footage showed 3 camera angles and I had to zoom in.)


Source: https://youtu.be/byD4bay9jd4


In a similar test, mom is showing a flashcard of a butterfly BUT the word written on the card is MARIPOSA (Spanish for butterfly). Akhil does not speak Spanish, that we're told. He spells MARIPOSA not BUTTERFLY. If he's "seeing" the card in mom's head, why not spell the picture he sees: BUTTERFLY?

 

[Charlie Wiser]

For education and critique: I don't know if Akhil is getting the letters from his mom's signals or by some other way. My feelings are the latter, for various reasons, but that could only be proven in a controlled setting. Here's a really odd incident that happens right after he spells CROCODILE - note how happy he is that he got it right, then note his immediate change in mood when Ky Dickens asks if he could read an image from HER mind. His face drops. He looks at a loss. His mom stammers. She suggests doing it later, they need pieces of paper or index cards... WHY? Ky has the flashcards right there. Why does mom suddenly want to switch to index cards and do it "later"?

Note also how Ky immediately capitulates. I believe this is a case of the experimenter becoming the subject of the experiment. Mom has become the experimenter at this point. She dictates how the test will be done. Take from that what you will...


Source: https://youtu.be/tn7zWsR0yoE

 

[Gaspa]

I showed that his analysis is either so bad that it takes him nearly a decade to recognize an error,

But did you show that? I didn't get that from the quotes. I see no evidence of him failing to "recognize an error" as I see no evidence of him being in error about anything. Nor do I see evidence of him "refusing to admit" anything about his data and Sheldrake's.

Let's take Sheldrake's word for it, and say he showed his data to Wiseman when he said he did. If the data showed the same patterns, why would anyone expect Wiseman to change his conclusion when seeing this? It's more data showing the same sort of pattern, if he is consistent with his analysis, it will just add to the confidence of his conclusion: it's more data points leading to the same conclusion as before.

It's not really surprising. Believers in magic see evidence of magic where there is none. So Sheldrake shows his data and "explains" to Wiseman how it is evidence of magic. Wiseman looks at the data, remains unconvinced, and goes about his day as he should. I mean... Sheldrake seems like a nice guy and all, but no one really takes him seriously, and for good reason.

I really don't see where you're getting evidence of bad faith. Even if he had taken a decade to recognize an error (which I haven't seen evidence of), that would just make him human. I mean, look at all the psi researchers who fail to admit they have been wrong for several decades. Can I just start saying they are bad faith actors?

The whole "Wiseman acts in bad faith" is just an ad hominem.

Which makes your whole

If in your reply you mean to simply call Sheldrake mean names, don't bother responding please. Engage substantively, or not at all.

just so precious.

 

[analiennamed]

I hope some of you will take the time to listen to the podcast. There are so many stories, doctors, studies, parents, teachers, anecdotes referenced it's impossible to wrap it up in a video for y'all to debunk. In the podcast episode about akil there are tests when he is in a different room, but they aren't pictured on their website.

The website says they are saving content for the documentary and I hope they include excerpts with better test parameters because it pains me to watch akils mom fidget on camera.

 

[analiennamed]

As a speech pathology grad student who has read just about everything published on FC ever and is very familiar with nonspeaking clients/students, I suspect this is due to 'prompt dependency.'

Basically, he couldn't do this without subtle prompts from his "communication and regulation partner" (the person who helps him type) even though he's not being physically prompted with touch.

I have yet to watch the whole thing (grad students aren't known for free time), so if you provide a time stamp I can more easily discuss this with you.

I'll jump on this in earnest once I get my boring school chores done!!

Thank you for your reply. The video I uploaded is only about 30 seconds. It's clear akils mom is moving along with akils typing, but to answer dozens and dozens of random questions about pictures, numbers and excerpts of books seems like this is a person who is a savant at magic tricks.

 

[Gaspa]

He's right that Wiseman appears a bit shirty about the whole case, but if you read the two pdfs I linked to, you'll see he's got good reason to be. (The former one was the contemporaneous rebuttal, the latter one is more a retrospective. Reading the latter, you'll start to imagine sighs of frustration.)

Now that I had the time to read through them...

RS has presented the results of our work in the main text of this book. However, instead of stating that we had concluded that our experiments did not support the existence of Jaytee's claimed abilities, he described our data as follows:
The pattern was very similar to that in my own experiments, and confirmed that Jaytee anticipated Pam's arrival even when she was returning at a randomly chosen time in an unfamiliar vehicle. (Sheldrake, 1999b, p. 46). RS only described our actual conclusions (i.e., that we believe that our experiments do not support claims about Jaytee's psychic abilities) in an endnote, published in a very small font, at the very back of the book

http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/psychicdogreply.pdf

Geez! The guy does some meaningless, cargo-cult science, post-hoc analysis of the data to misrepresent the findings of their study in his book. And Sheldrake's fanboys think it's Wiseman who acts in bad faith. Go figure.

 

[John J.]

Even skeptics like Susan Blackmore replicate ganzfield.

Maybe update yourself on why Susan Blackmore became (arguably) a sceptic, because she certainly didn't start off as one.

It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena—only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Blackmore

My impression is that this is in parallel with her views nowadays on other claimed psychic phenomena.

 

[analiennamed]

Physical touch is not the only type of support you can give someone, these typers are still being supported. When I work with kids I never touch them (unless to play or provide sensory input), but I've taught kids to pronounce sounds they couldn't say and think of words they have forgotten, among many many more. I've worked with adults who lost their ability to spell after having a stroke, and I never touched them but they still learned how to spell target words. We change the way we ask questions (yes/no is easier than multiple choice, which is easier than fill-in-the-blank, which is easier than wh-questions, etc), use gestures, model how to do things, and more--largely without touching any client. That doesn't mean they're independent yet.

Also, if another person is holding the letterboard or iPad as is common in the current FC styles, they are usually moving the board to meet the speller's finger.

I've had many many nonspeaking clients who use their devices to independently ask for something (I want __, I need __) because a previous therapist only worked on that. They can't name objects or describe something or comment, though.

There are very few absolutes in communication, especially with nonspeaking folks. "Not being touched" doesn't necessarily equate to independence. I find these nuances are often lost with FC proponents.

But do you think these folks would have the sophistication of support to answer dozens of random questions, reading multiple people's thoughts (the podcast discusses how cameramen got to participate and also had their minds read), random numbers... That's a lot of sophisticated coordination to have a 100% success rate no?

 

[Ann K]

For education and critique: This is Akhil spelling CROCODILE.

...and his mother conspicuously does a repetition of the hand position for both of the letters "C" and a repetition of a different hand position for both of the letters "O". Not coincidentally, we are all familiar with how speedily a person can read sign language.

 

[analiennamed]

We don't know if he is mentally disabled any more than we know that he is of superior intelligence. What we know is that he has great difficulty communicating with others.

Okay, but all of the doctors in their lives are telling these parents there is no one home, no one in there, and there is no hope in trying to establish communication... So we do have professionals making assessments of these kids

 

[Ann K]

Okay, but all of the doctors in their lives are telling these parents there is no one home, no one in there, and there is no hope in trying to establish communication... So we do have professionals making assessments of these kids

There is a big difference between "establishing communication" and invoking a response by use of a well-practiced stimulus.