In a series of experiments, Cornell psychology professor? Daryl Bem has demonstrated “numerous ‘retroactive’ psi effects – that is, phenomena that are inexplicable according to current scientific knowledge” among hundreds of Cornell students. As the BPS Research Digest summarizes: “Take priming, the effect whereby a subliminal (i.e. too fast for conscious detection) presentation of a word or concept speeds subsequent reaction times for recognition of a related stimulus. Bem turned this around by having participants categorize pictures as negative or positive and then presenting them subliminally with a negative or positive word. That is, the primes came afterwards. Students were quicker, by an average of 16.5ms, to categorize negative pictures as negative when they were followed by a negative subliminal word (e.g. ‘threatening’), almost as if that word were acting as a prime working backwards in time.” Bern suggests the explanation may lie in quantum effects: “Those who follow contemporary developments in modern physics … will be aware that several features of quantum phenomena are themselves incompatible with our everyday conception of physical reality,” Bern writes. “Many psi researchers see sufficiently compelling parallels between these phenomena and characteristics of psi to warrant considering them as potential candidates for theories of psi.” [%comments]
Are Cornell Students Psychic?
TAGS: psi effects, psychology
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A good Bayesian response/destruction of this:
http://www.ruudwetzels.com//articles/Wagenmakersetal_subm.pdf
No, but a degree from Cornell just declined in value a whole lot. The paper leaves out way too many details to guess where the problem is. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
Call James (the Amazing) Randi, he’ll give the professor a million dollars if the data is correct. That’s why it isn’t true:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
Well, it could be because the two stimuli are processed by different parts of the brain at different speeds, so that the end result appears counter-intuitive.
Or it could be quantum mechanics. (Insert Twilight Zone music here.) But for my money it looks more like special relativity. Remember (or at least those of you who passed your relativity course as a physics undergrad, remember) that it’s possible for two observers to disagree about the order in which two events in space-time occurred.
Extraordinary claims don’t require extraordinary proof. They just require SOME proof.
Explaining some seemingly magical phenomenon away by claiming some piece of quantum mechanics is at work fits in the same basket as the phrase ‘removing toxins’ in pseudo-health care circles. Scientific sounding, but far from scientific.
Nevertheless, even if it’s bunk, I appreciate the creativeness of the original postulation and subsequent attempt at testing it’s veracity.
The obvious question is: what happens if you pick out the prime, but than never show it to the subjects, do you still get an increase in reaction speed? Maybe the data isn’t traveling back in time, maybe the subjects are just picking up psychic signals from the computer?
Of course that hypothesis is just as terrible as the published theory, if you’re going to put forth a supernatural explanation you also have to have a control group for other possible supernatural causes.
Maybe there are a lot of witches at Cornell and they’re skewing the results. I’d imagine this would involve throwing water on the subjects – which would at least be more entertaining.
The point is that if you’re going attribute results to supernatural causes you should at the very least take in to account the possibility of other supernatural causes, and control for them in your experiments, instead of just focusing on your pet theory.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite physics experiments back in high school, in which we dropped two items and timed how long it would take for the items to land. Our timing device was in no way driven by human response time to rule out any possibility of error due to the time required to hit a stopwatch.
In our experiment, the 1 kg weight consistently took more time to hit the floor than the 3 kg weight, which took more time than the 10 kg weight. My lab team immediately and proudly reported that our experiment had falsified the theory that acceleration due to gravity was a constant, thus making Galileo incorrect.
Needless to say, our physics teacher asked us to go back and explain why this particular experimental error showed up in our results.
I’m not holding my breath for independent verification of this study result.