Psi in the News

Thanks Matt! I agree completely re: Leonard George's experiential approach. It was really powerful to see his work immediately alongside Chris French's 'psychic challenge.' The difference in methodology is very telling, I think, of some of the issues with what exactly is trying to be proven when different people run these experiments. All of the research shows that designing a test the way that French designed his will lead to poor results. That's like taking two random people off of a junior high basketball team and testing them as if they were Olympic level athletes, then when they didn't perform up to par, stating that this was the highest level of achievement possible. This is something that I think has been recently shown in the tests on Matthieu Ricard, who is demonstrating "unheard of" neurological results during his meditation. In Jack Rourke's recent book The Rational Psychic, he has some interesting bits on running personality profiles on people who purport to be psychic, and how certain anomalies present in 'borderline personality disorder,' such as increase empathetic response, can often be correlated with claims of experiencing anomalous intuition. To start off with purported psychics, and then test them as if they could perform, really doesn't tell us anything except for whether or not they can perform. The level of analysis that needs to be done prior to the test is extensive, to see exactly where their psychological profile fits, what might be leading to their experience of anomalous perception, and then when enough folks are tested on those lines it can be determined who is the best candidate for control groups and for testing "legit" psychical experiences. This is something they do at the Windbridge Institute, and it takes a lot of time and effort, to vet effective experiencers to do further testing with.