Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities by Dean Radin Ph.D

Author:Dean Radin, Ph.D. [Radin, Dean, Ph.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deepak Chopra Books
Published: 2013-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

Much more can be said about the statistics used to analyze psi experiments, but to fully appreciate those arguments would take us far beyond the scope of this book. The bottom line is this: The trembling in academic journals over how science must be falling apart because of positive evidence for psi is a desperate attempt to maintain a stable worldview where psi can’t exist. But when correctly applied, scientific methods are exceptionally powerful and for the most part they are perfectly sound. The reality of psi does indeed challenge some scientific assumptions, but it does not mean we need to radically change everything we know.

At least not yet.

Bem’s innovative approach is relatively new, and as such the jury is not yet in on whether the effect will be easily repeatable by others. As I was writing this chapter, several replication attempts have been reported. Some of those studies were successful; others failed to repeat the effect. Nineteen replications based on one of Bem’s designs were meta-analyzed in a paper by Jeff Galak of Carnegie Mellon University and his colleagues.231 Galak’s review was entitled “Failures to Replicate Psi” in spite of the fact that only fifteen of the nineteen replications actually employed methods similar to those used by Bem. When those fifteen studies were considered as a separate group, they provided a significant, positive replication. The other four experiments were conducted online, which simplifies recruitment of participants but at the price of introducing many uncontrolled variables (which is why Bem did not conduct his experiments that way). Galak’s paper further trumpets that their own attempted replications, seven in all, included 3,289 participants. This sounds impressive until you learn that over 80 percent of those people participated online. The devil is often in the details, and sometimes the details within articles reporting failures to replicate are not quite as negative as they are advertised.

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