Psychic Ability Claim Doesn't Hold Up In New Scientific Experiments

cold fjord writes with some stunning news from the world of science, excerpting: "A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real. Skeptics may scoff at the finding as obvious, but the research is important because it refutes a study published in a psychological journal last year that claimed to find evidence of extrasensory perception. That research, conducted by Daryl Bem of Cornell University, triggered outrage in the psychological community when the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology announced in 2010 that the paper had been accepted for publication." Here's a link to the academic paper.

Comments

Re:Social Psychology?

[rgbatduke]

Actually, imaging of electromagnetic fields around the brain is done routinely, not so much by physicists but by scientists (e.g. biological psychologists and neurophysiologists) and physicians. The tools for doing so are things like EEG hardware, fMRI, SQUID-based transducers, implants, and more. The methodology has gotten so advanced that they can observe e.g. maps of lit neurons in the working visual cortex that correspond in a 1 to 1 manner to a presented visual field or differentiate the word you are thinking about from fMRI activity (from a palette of previously measured/associated words).

In spite of all of the many experiments that have indeed been done looking for a "soul" or a seat of consciousness outside of the actual physical brain, not one of them has succeeded and there isn't the slightest good reason to think that this is so. There is absolutely no observed or inferred relationship between subatomic particles and some ill-defined quantum of consciousness. Everything we know about consciousness (and at this point we know a rather lot) is entirely consistent with it being a high level manifestation of self-organizing critical behavior supported by an evolved and highly complex macroscopic physical substrate where the fundamental "units" of thought are neural transitions mediated by neurotransmitters -- pure electrochemistry, which is not only not subatomic it is molecular, superatomic involving many atoms.

However, observing the phylogenetic progression of intelligence and brain size, structure, and capacity, it is also perfectly clear that humans' ability to engage in "higher order thought" is intimately tied into language and semantics -- symbolic ontology -- which is at least two or three orders up from neural activity -- not only is it fundamental neurochemical, evolutionarily a control system for a complex pattern of entropy-generating biochemistry, it is the result of a subtle process of memetic evolution of self-consistent abstraction leading to the ability to actually "think" about our environment and make verbal, visual, symbolic inferences. In other words, it isn't based on smaller physical things, it is a reflection of coherent activity of the already macroscopic physical chemical processes of neural action, far more macroscopic and (by virtue of its organization) different in nature and character. As my (world-reknowned) instructor in statistical physics and complex systems (Richard Palmer) once remarked in a lecture on this very topic "more is different" and thought is the result of a lot more, and makes no sense at all interpreted as the motion of raw individual electrons, let alone "subatomic particles".

There is so much more to whack in your absurd statements. You assert that an "electromagnetic unit" is smaller than the smallest subatomic particle. Since physicists believe that "subatomic" (I assume that you mean "elementary") particles are point-like objects with no physical extent, that would be a neat trick. It is difficult to get smaller than "no size at all". You are obviously completely ignorant of actual electromagnetic theory, or you would be forced to put your statement in some sort of consistent relationship with our knowledge of the photon as an electromagnetic unit, electric charge as an electromagnetic unit, the actual elementary particles which have charge and which couple via electromagnetic interactions to other charged particles. Stating that all of this will be proven with studies "one day" when instruments have become even better is semantically null -- if scientists knew what would be proven "one day" without doing the experiments before the instruments in question have even been invented, they'd be -- wait for it -- psychic!

Oh, wait, I see, that's how you know all of this. And because you "just know" it via your ESP, you don't need to actually verify any of it by studying it or doing or even learning about the many subtle and excellent experiments that are done by neur