Fringe-ology (8 page)

McMoneagle also accurately described the contents of a building on a Soviet naval base on the Baltic Sea. Military analysts initially scoffed at what he came up with—a submarine far bigger than any then known, with a set of missile tubes located, contrary to standard design, in front of the conning tower. But later, satellite photos proved him right. He had apparently described the
Typhoon
, a super-secret Soviet sub.

Skeptics might explain these kinds of dramatic successes as the product of basic probability laws—make enough drawings of enough targets and you're bound to get something right. Or perhaps the details, in these particularly evocative cases, had somehow been leaked to the viewers. But this is far from the last word. The Army's RVers didn't just capture dazzle shots. In fact, analysis of their work suggested they were producing accurate information at a rate significantly above chance. And in one analysis, skeptics and believers came awfully close to lying down together. In fact, skeptic Ray Hyman wrote in his “Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena” that the results he saw could not, in his estimation, be put down to chance or any methodological flaw he could find. He refrained from calling psi an established fact by only the thinnest of margins—positing that some methodological flaw might be discovered in the future.

Since then, the state of play has remained much the same, and the storm of debate in psi research has often revolved around meta-analyses. A meta-analysis is, in essence, a study of studies. Take a stack of related research findings, conduct a rigorous statistical analysis, and read the numbers. Well, meta-analyses of what's known as the Ganzfeld database tend to show evidence for the unbelievable. In Ganzfeld tests, receivers sit with halved Ping-Pong balls taped over their eyes and plugs in their ears, then try to pick up accurate information. Proponents say that cutting off the normal sensory channels allows other information to come through—like a radio antennae plucking the signal from noise.

Performing a meta-analysis on this research, one of the most well-known scientists working in parapsychology, Dean Radin, found a 32 percent hit rate when 25 percent is expected by chance. He calculated the odds against chance for the positive results at 29 quintillion to 1. But the single most promising area for further research may lie in “brain correlation” experiments.

These studies go by different names, which rigorously avoid the dreaded
T
word, because the mere mention of telepathy is likely to draw emotional fire from someone's amygdala, somewhere. (
Case in point:
British parapsychologist Guy Lyon Playfair tells a very funny story about attempting to study psychic functioning in twins. Instead of using the word
telepathy
, he tried to placate the mainstream by declaring he was studying “biological correlates of empathy.”)

In most of these studies, two subjects, usually with some prior personal connection, are separated and rigged up in skullcaps designed to monitor their brain waves. While one subject, the “receiver,” sits in a bland featureless room with nothing much happening, the “sender” is exposed to stimuli. The idea is to see whether the introduction of a stimulus to the “sender” produces a corresponding reaction in the receiver's brain. Will agitation in the sender, or for that matter pleasure, be mimicked in the brain of their partner? Dean Radin has collected thirty-three of these experiments, the majority conducted since 1994, with strongly positive results for the presence of brain correlation—which we'll bravely call telepathy.

This is a drop in the scientific bucket, of course. When a field is really accepted, studies might more likely number in the hundreds—another sign of how psi remains ghettoized, or how far it still has to go.

There are small signs we might someday see a shift. Earlier, I mentioned that skeptics Wiseman and French had been gracious enough to admit the obvious: psi researchers have lots of good evidence. The question is whether or not they have enough. Perhaps even more incredibly, one of this country's most vocal atheists, Sam Harris, in the
End of Faith
, acknowledges the research for psi is so compelling that telepathy may need to be admitted into the canon of accepted knowledge. And there is more. Along the way, I spoke to Dr. Michael Persinger, a real gadfly to paranormal believers. Persinger is in most respects a kind of happy naysayer—no to God, no to ghosts—but he also happens to be a strong proponent of psi; and he was in the process of publishing his research on what he calls “the Harribance Effect.”

Working with an under-the-radar psychic named Sean Harribance, Persinger claims to have found a pattern of brain activity that correlates with psychic functioning. “Here's the really exciting part,” he says. “Here's the wow. When Harribance has actually gotten correct information, his brain state corresponds demonstrably with that of the person he's reading.”

Harribance spoke to me at length over the phone but wouldn't agree to see me in person. “I'm not interested in publicity,” he told me, multiple times.

Clearly, something is happening here in the land of psi. And inexplicable results should be the ones that pique a scientist's interest most. But once a subject has acquired what I call “the Paranormal Taint,” mainstream science tends to run in the other direction. As I see it, the Paranormal Taint is itself harmless, inert, and value neutral. But some people still regard the Taint either as a sign of holiness or toxicity, depending upon their point of view.

Both camps—of passionate believers and equally passionate deniers—are surpassingly small. Most of us are likely in the middle. We don't think much about a subject like psi research from day to day, and whatever opinion we hold is provisional. In other words, we would be interested in hearing out the evidence. The problem we encounter is the same one we see in our politics: When the media investigates a phenomenon like psi, or for that matter privatizing Social Security or forming a public health care system, they reach out to sources with diametrically opposed positions. That makes for higher drama, more colorful quotes, and, so the thinking goes, better radio or television.

What it doesn't bring us any closer to is the truth.

In Seattle, I met a woman who has been looking at the totality of psi research as dispassionately as she can, under the circumstances. Jessica Utts is a statistician from the University of California who admits she has always had an open mind about psi research. Her father had conducted some informal studies with her when she was a kid, she told me, with some success. But later on, when she delved into the world of statistics, she realized just how little such a home experiment mattered. “It wasn't science,” she told me, “and of course there was too small a sample size. We might have just gotten lucky. But it stayed with me, as a matter of curiosity.”

Utts has since gone on to write mainstream textbooks in her field, including
Seeing Through Statistics
, a primer on the responsible and irresponsible uses of statistics. She is aware that numbers can be abused just like words can—to say anything we'd like. And she learned to be a skeptic.

We spoke in a large cafeteria on the university campus. Students taking summer classes sat around us, out of earshot. Utts, a matronly looking woman with big eyes, a kind demeanor and a bob haircut, sipped a soda and told me about her first public foray into the paranormal.

Someone had advanced the claim that fewer riders board trains that subsequently crash. He had conducted a statistical analysis he felt demonstrated this fact, and a TV station investigating his study called Utts to look over his handiwork. In short order, she found a crash crucial to his finding occurred on Labor Day, when the vast majority of people were off work. Once the Labor Day crash was factored out of his study, his evidence evaporated.

Eventually, Utts applied her statistical expertise to the field of psi research. She found mixed results, which nonetheless topple the current mainstream view.

According to Utts, research claiming people can influence the output of a random number generator isn't convincing. Much of this research occurred at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, or PEAR, and Utts thinks these supposed mind–machine correlations don't prove the ability of mind to affect matter. But remote viewing? Telepathy? She felt the body of research there was so compelling, both methodologically and statistically, that someone needed to speak up for the bedraggled community of psi researchers. And that's how a statistician came to be one of the leading members of the Parapsychological Association.

She knew involving herself could cause her trouble at work—and she wasn't wrong. In fact, she told me, whenever her contract comes up for renewal she faces pretty much the same scenario: the panel that decides on merit increases splits its vote because, at any given time, two or three people in her department find their skin itches when they get a load of her Paranormal Taint. Her fate hanging in the balance, her name gets kicked upstairs for a review, and . . . she gets paid. My own estimation: her mainstream credentials—those textbooks—are so strong that her credibility can't be denied. “Statistics,” says Utts, “when you know how to read them and you have a big enough database, don't lie. I'm as convinced as I need to be that something is going on here. How it works, I don't know. You'd have to talk to someone else about that. But if you look at the research, the numbers are there.”

T
HE PHRASE
“E
XTRAORDINARY CLAIMS
require extraordinary evidence” was first coined by skeptic Marcello Truzzi, of whom we'll hear more later. It was subsequently popularized by Carl Sagan. Regardless, the slogan is merely a pithy, modernized exaggeration of what the humanist philosopher David Hume declared roughly 250 years earlier about miracles. Hume famously argued that before we believe in a miracle, there should be so much evidence it occurred we'd be more foolish
not
to believe in it.

In practical terms, this makes good sense. Any claim that might require scientists to double back and reverify earlier findings or assumptions is a potential time waster. Before they begin questioning the foundation on which current research stands, they should see evidence that the ground really has shifted under their feet. The argument put forth by skeptics is that psi is an extraordinary claim; thus an extraordinary amount of data is required to support it. As skeptic Ray Hyman put it, if psi exists, “the fundamental principles that have so successfully guided the progress of science from the days of Galileo and Newton to the present time must be drastically revised.”

For the moment, without accepting or rejecting Hyman's claim that psi undermines our understanding of physics, let's just understand that this is the calling to which skeptics claim to respond. And so they have insisted, for decades, that parapsychologists must employ tighter and tighter controls on their studies—to eliminate obvious possibilities like fraud, and more subtle ones, like sensory leakage, in which the receiver in a telepathy study becomes aware of the target. In response, parapsychologists have increased the rigor of their methodology. But no matter what lengths they have gone to in order to satisfy the skeptics, the skeptics have yet to be satisfied. And during a period in the late 1970s and early '80s, this back-and-forth between the skeptical community and parapsychologists was so robust that it became a subject of study all its own.

Using the conflict between skeptics and parapsychologists as a lens, sociologists began research into how science is conducted, not in its idealized form, but in reality. Sociologist Trevor Pinch subsequently identified a group of “scientific vigilantes,” people who did not always hold scientific degrees but nonetheless appointed themselves to guard the borders of “true” science.

The sociologists involved never took a side on the issue of psi itself. But in mediating the debate, they described the skeptics as an unruly and largely unscientific bunch. I recently interviewed Pinch, one of the most prolific authors on the subject, and he told me his findings surprised him. Initially he suspected the accusations leveled by skeptics were correct: parapsychologists, as they were known, were somehow self-deceived, employing shoddy controls on their experiments or committing outright fraud.

What he found was the exact opposite: psi researchers took the skeptics seriously, conducting experiments according to methodology that at least kept pace with the most rigorous of the psychological sciences. When they produced positive results, the skeptics claimed the controls needed to be tighter still. Then tighter. “It was hard not to feel bad for the parapsychologists, really,” says Pinch now. “These were qualified, sincere researchers doing serious work, and they always had to deal with this group of people that were essentially engaged in a lot of name-calling.”

Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Mayer, in her book
Extraordinary Knowing
, tells her own story of discovery. She started looking at parapsychological research after a psychic correctly predicted where her daughter's lost harp could be found. She didn't believe in psychics. She had in fact learned during her own university education that parapsychology was bunk. And so she set out on a personal mission: to prove to herself that psi is hogwash. “I began discovering mountains of research and a vast relevant literature I hadn't known existed,” she writes. “As astonished as I was by the sheer quantity, I was equally astonished by the high caliber. Much of the research not only met but far exceeded ordinary standards of rigorous mainstream science.”

By way of comparison, she found the
Skeptical Inquirer,
one of the foremost skeptical journals, to read like a “fundamentalist religious tract.” Like Pinch, she had quickly reached a surprising conclusion: professional skeptics accused the parapsychologists of practicing “pseudoscience,” essentially a kind of fraud, in which psi researchers claim to be scientific but don't employ the scientific method. They just didn't seem able to support the charge.