ESP exists?

According to this study yes, it does.

Discuss.

edited 6th Jan '11 4:53:15 PM by americanbadass

Does Controversial Study Prove ESP is Real?

edited 6th Jan '11 4:57:33 PM by Nyktos

Lol did you read more then the title? 'caus that isn't a very convincing article

edited 6th Jan '11 4:59:28 PM by CommandoDude

How the heck is it a leak if the professor put it up himself?

53 to 50 percent of the time

Really? Really.

edited 6th Jan '11 5:02:22 PM by Tzetze

my dice are psychic!

Even if your names on it, if you release something without permission it's a leak. An author and release his/her novel but if the publisher didn't tell them to it's still a leak.

edited 6th Jan '11 5:16:51 PM by americanbadass

Ugh. I wish I remembered enough of my statistics classes to go through that properly. As it is, I can say that the P value appears to be small enough... but everything else went over my head too far to say if it is or not.

My gut instinct says it's false, though.

This study is hardly clear evidence for ESP, but I think people are dismissing this a little too quickly.

Well of course it should be dismissed quickly. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence after all.

Wake me up in 6 months if someone manages to replicate it somehow.

Certainly does! You can buy cars with it and everything.

What he said.

As the Cbs articles claims , don't like the results change the test.

Seriously do you really think scientist went out with the idea of proving ESP exists? More than likely they went out to disprove it and where shocked by the results and felt they needed to be published.

No, the introduction goes on about the skepticism psi researches have to deal with for a few pages.

I know I've read it, If I thought it was fake and I found evidence it was real I'd put that in too. It only makes sense, most scientific paper's have an anti- skeptic clause in the first few pages.

Wake me up in 6 months if someone manages to replicate it somehow.

That's actually my position. I'm mostly skeptical, but I'm willing to consider the possibility of ESP if the study is somehow replicated.

I somewhat believe and I am skeptical of everything even proven things. I believe that there is a possibility that every thing is possible, and nothing is impossible, but that it's a low possibility and some things are absolutes until proven other wise.

Oddly I find it funny that out of all the scientific fields the one closet to a pseudo-science is the most skeptical.

edited 6th Jan '11 7:06:13 PM by americanbadass

The article said that they predicted correctly 50-53% of the time. Isn't that about exactly how often probability says it should happen?

Extrasensory perception (ESP) involves reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind.

This is not what the test proved. It proved that when you ask people to guess where something is between two places, you get about 50% accuracy.

edited 9th Jan '11 6:13:24 PM by thatguythere47

Three percent either way isn't something I'd call significant. Forty percent is something to pay attention to, particularly if it's repeatable.

Proving that someone somewhere has ESP is akin to proving that there are UF Os. You can have lead-pipe evidence that 999 sightings are something else, but if you can't explain the 1000th sighting, I'm going to keep an open mind. That doesn't mean I'm going to build a UFO Welcome Center in my front yard.

It's possible that ESP, if it exists, doesn't work the way scientists expect it to work. You can't see X-rays, and if you don't have the equipment to detect them, you can only infer their existence. Someone who doesn't have ESP can only make inferences and guess at the type of equipment needed. That's how pure research works.

In one of them, as described by the Times, students were asked to choose which of two curtains on a computer screen hid a photograph. When the pictures were erotic, students beat chance 53 to 50 percent of the time. Boring pictures seemed to have no effect. Clearly because psychics can only sense really alluring content.

BEHOLD, THE POWER OF PORN!

I am reading the original article, in full, and so far I see no major flaws in it. From the first set of experiments they report:

"Across all 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%, t(99) = 2.51, p = .01, d = 0.25.3 In contrast, their hit rate on the nonerotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8%, t(99) = -0.15, p = .56. This was true across all types of nonerotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but nonerotic pictures, 50.2%. (All t values < 1.) The difference between erotic and nonerotic trials was itself significant, tdiff(99) = 1.85, p = .031, d = 0.19."

In the social sciences, any "p value" (an estimate of the liklihood that the effects found were due to chance) below .05 is considered significant enough to warrant an explanation. A "d value' is an estimate of the effect size and usually anything between d = .20 and .80 is considered "medium". 53% correct is well above chance given the number of participants and trials they conducted. Note that the really interesting finding here isn't simply that people we able to guess where a picture was better than chance, it's that emotional arousal appears to trigger the ability. They also report some association with "stimulus seeking" as a personality trait.

Some minor nitpicks: the participants were self-selected and knew that they were participating in an experiment on "ESP". I would imagine that this resulted in an above average number of participants who are "Non-skeptics". There is no obvious way that this would affect the results, but still.

They don't explicitly state that the experimenters had no way of knowing where the picture was going to be, but this is strongly implied by the use of a random computer program to assign the location of the pictures. EDIT: toward the end of the article Bem addresses this.

So far, strong enough that the article shouldn't be summarily dismissed. It does need to be replicated, though.

edited 11th Jan '11 5:29:41 PM by DeMarquis

to what end? If we do have a sixth sense for sniffing out hidden porn with an extra 3% accuracy how would that effect anything ever?

Or maybe 3% of the population has been blessed with "pron sight"

If America can single out this 3% and use them to track down porn we can spearhead the "porn race" and start finding and stockpile porn before those dirty reds have a chance to create there own stockpile.

edited 11th Jan '11 5:37:44 PM by Justice4243

Porn was just used as a stimulus to create emotional arousal. The implication is that any source of emotional arousal (and they also tested negative stimuli) triggers the effect. They speculate that evolution may have favored those who are able to anticipate danger had a survival advantage, but that's going waay beyond the data.

If we do have a sixth sense for sniffing out hidden porn with an extra 3% accuracy how would that effect anything ever?

It would invalidate some important physical laws?