Tell My Mother I'm Not Dead by Trevor Hamilton

Author:Trevor Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Life after death, post-partem survival, death, mediums, mediumship, SPR, Society for Psychical Research, psychic, clairvoyance, clairvoyant, case study, Myers, discarnate, parapsychology
ISBN: 9781845404598
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

He saw sensitivity as a weakness not a strength

True

He apologises

Other

He was too harsh and unforgiving

True

What was additionally alarming was that medium 10 used almost identical language in describing my relationship with my father, thus reinforcing my suspicion that cold reading was being deployed.

Furthermore, the cold reading technique can be powerfully enhanced by the charisma of the medium and by the artificial situation the sitters find themselves in. Schouten (1994) has written effectively on these points. It often occurred to me over these years that visiting a medium was, in some ways, not that different from going to the dentist, having your haircut, seeing a doctor. I was putting myself in the hands of somebody with expertise which I hadn’t got and who would be concentrating exclusively on me for a fixed period of time. The instinctive tendency to trust the experts and to accept their statements and their authority is quite natural, and under the influence of powerful emotions and possible subtle manipulation by an individual of a certain charm, it is not easy to remain objective.

It also forcibly struck me, both during the preliminary research reading and at the sitting, and listening to the transcripts afterwards, that Anne and I could not always escape the subjective nature of our assessments. This is a difficult problem to surmount (O’Keeffe and Wiseman, 2005). We had plenty of true/false statements - quite impressive the number of true ones at first sight. But I/we needed to distinguish between different kinds of true statements. What was the evidence base for each statement, where was it, how objective was it, and to what extent was it highly specific to us and to Ralph? (See Appendix 1: 164.)

I came across the research of Robertson and Roy (2001) [4] which provided some reassurance on this point. They did a considerable amount of work with mediums to test the premise that much of the material they generated was so vague and broad that it could apply to almost anyone. Their work seemed to demonstrate that the best performers produced accurate statements which were picked out by the intended recipient and not by other sitters in the control groups.

But there was one final question - could all these statements have been the product of lucky guesswork built upon a foundation of sophisticated cold reading? Were there any statistical tools for evaluating probabilities in this area? Was I hugely exaggerating the impressiveness of some of the information put forward? There were two questions I really wished to have answered. The first was - even though individual statements might not be remarkable - was their particular combination with a large number of other accurate statements well above what chance would suggest? I began to realise how difficult this was when I read an article (Rogers, Davis and Fisk, 2009) which examined the hypothesis that believers in the paranormal were more inclined to make conjunction errors in reasoning than non-believers. That is, they were more likely to ‘misperceive co-occurring (conjunct) events as being more likely than singular (constituent) events alone’.

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