Cactus of Mystery: The Shamanic Powers of the Peruvian San Pedro Cactus by Heaven Ross

Author:Heaven, Ross [Heaven, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Shamanism/Entheogens
ISBN: 9781594775130
Publisher: Park Street Press
Published: 2012-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

PUTTING THE CORK BACK IN THE BOTTLE

I won’t describe the entire experiment or the details of the results—that will be published in a scientific journal—but suffice to say that the experiment was a success in the end.

By the end of the twenty trials I had successfully selected the target in advance eight times out of twenty, which equates to a 40 percent hit rate compared to a chance hit of 25 percent. This figure is slightly better than the average 32 percent hit rate found with the Ganzfeld altered state classically used to experimentally test for psi (e.g., see Radin, 2006), but although my score is better than chance it is not particularly extraordinary based on just twenty trials.

However, the method by which I had planned in advance to analyze the data is slightly more refined. This method considers the rank assigned to each clip in relation to the probability of assigning that rank. In this way it would be expected that, out of a range of between one and four, the target would be ranked as 2.5 on average according to chance. The actual average target rank of all twenty trials was 2.0, indicating that my overall score was safely above chance. The important bit for scientists is that the probability of getting this score is less than 5 percent, or looking at it another way, less than 1 in 20, which is the standard level at which scientists accept that the results are meaningful.

This means that if I had selected my targets merely by chance we would only expect to get these results if we ran the entire experiment twenty times. The thought of that makes me feel quite queasy, anticipating that nausea for hours on end again another twenty times. So chance must take a back seat to improbability and the results as they are must be considered to be what scientists call “statistically significant”—that is, the experiment, this time at least, must be accepted as successful in demonstrating precognition.

One problem, however, is that we cannot be certain that it was San Pedro that caused these significant results, because perhaps I have reliable precognitive abilities anyway even without San Pedro. This is a possibility, of course, but it should be noted that my ability to visualize a scene in my mental imagery was definitely enhanced by the cactus and it was the relationship of this visualization to the clip that led to my accurate choices.

A better experiment would have had an identical series of comparison tests where I didn’t take San Pedro but rather a dummy version of it—this is what we call a placebo-controlled condition. But a placebo study is just wishful thinking because it really isn’t easy to fake a San Pedro experience with a nonpsychedelic substance. Sure, I could have eaten something to give me stomach cramps, but how to induce the sense of meaningfulness and the increased mental imagery? I would surely have known that the placebo was bogus.

One possibility, almost never used

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