Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by timothy on from the pre-imagining-the-counterevidence dept.

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.

8 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. in my minds eye by pinfall · · Score: 3, Funny

    I see a flurry of dumb comments being posted on /..

  2. Not surprising by mseeger · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have foreseen that outcome....

    1. Re:Not surprising by JamesP · · Score: 1, Funny

      Funny how it's the skeptics who 'claim' they knew the results of this beforehand.

      Oh, and by the way, when you do an experiment like that, make sure you use a proper random number generator. (one that has a *tested* uniform distribution - if you're expecting a uniform distribution of course, otherwise, test for the distribution you're expecting)

      --
      how long until /. fixes commenting on Chrome?
    2. Re:Not surprising by NEDHead · · Score: 5, Funny

      Actually, I believe there was a cable problem...

    3. Re:Not surprising by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 4, Funny

      In this case, in order to get random numbers that are more random, I suggest that you generate a large number of them, say 10,000, and then take their average.

      --
      My first program:

      Hell Segmentation fault

    4. Re:Not surprising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Exactly! If there were psychic powers, it would be a world where those with average intellects would control vast fortunes, where hard work and study didn't pay off, and where people mindlessly followed trivial events while ignoring important events.

      Nothing like the real world.

  3. Re:Social Psychology? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ESP is already proven to those using it on a daily basis. Physicists shouldn't ever ignore aspects of reality, b/c what they aim to do is to describe reality. They haven't done imaging of electromagnetic fields around brains yet (which are the antennae for our consciousnesses which are located outside our bodies beyond time and space). The brain is a sequencer unit for the sole purpose of serializing perception. There's also a relationship between subatomic particles and their respective consciousness-lets, there's a transitional state between consciousness and matter called not-yet-matter. An Electromagnetic Unit is smaller than the smallest subatomic particle. It will all be proven with scientific studies one day when instruments have become even better. Physicists should use mathematics properly. Math is not a toy, it's a tool.

  4. So I can't ever have Jedi powers? by loufoque · · Score: 4, Funny

    Damn. Thanks for ruining my day.