Episode 13: Learning ESP

 Episode summary: Can people learn ESP? Can parapsychologists ever bother to have an idea of what ESP even is? No and no. 

Bike summary: 2.3 miles, 118.4 calories.

Amusingly, this episode starts out with film from one of the Moon landings, while Nimoy discusses astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who conducted four "experiments" sending telepathic messages while he orbited the Earth. It's amusing because Nimoy is talking about all this alleged phenomenae over these images and all I could think of was Coleman Francis' infamously bizarre narration of his science fiction horror film, The Beast of Yucca Flats. 

But we soon get to meat of the episode. Having discussed ESP, Nimoy says "Many scientists believe it can be taught."

Much like the psychic detectives episode, this really puts the cart before the horse. 

This episode focuses a lot on things like Zenner cards and random number generation and there's a lot of footage of people concentrating hard. Even today, parapsychologists rely on these things and, much like homeopaths, make use of meta-analyses (often heavily cherry-picked) to try to argue that ESP exists, but they completely miss the point. It doesn't matter how many Zenner cards you pick that match the ones somebody else picked in another room. The problem is that there's no theory to test. The hypothesis "Humans have ESP" is like something you do for a science fair. It's not a testable theory.

Essentially, the problem is that it lacks a mechanism. In science there's a principle called Occam's Razor, which is basically that the simplest explanations are usually correct. For example, 19th century scientists believed that light needed a medium to propogate in, the way sound waves do. This medium, the luminiferous ether, would fill all space and have certain testable properties. However, over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, three things happened: firstly, James Clerk Maxwell and TK Hertz put the idea of light as an electromagnetic wave on a very good theoretical and experimental basis, astronomers Albert Michaelson and TK Morley did experiments that didn't find the properties that the ether was expected to have and Einstein put the nail in the coffin with Special Relativity, which made different predictions about light that were found to be correct and didn't need the ether. 

Without any way for ESP to work, the evidence from Zenner cards and other experiments are indistinguishable from noise. Because of the way they set up the experiments, they're assuming psychic effects are large and obvious, which is a pretty big assumption to make.

It's a pretty big leap to go from the undemonstrated, shaky, barely a hypothesis nature of ESP to teaching it, but this is In Search Of.

From, Edgar Mitchell in Earth orbit we zoom in to Nimoy in a Los Angeles-area elementary school (queue Naked Gun) sitting at a table with a bunch of children. He shows them Zenner cards and asks them to guess the one he's holding. One of them, JJ, is particularly good, but I think this is because he can see what cards Nimoy is holding. 

From the kids, they cut to a man called Lawrence or Laurence Kennedy who was doing some weird performance in an Elvis-style jumpsuits, doing something that looked like a faith healing, but was a spoon-bending demonstration in what looked like a Catholic church. This would be odd, given the Catholic stance on psychic phenomena, but it was the 1970s. 

Personally, I've never really gotten the attraction of spoon-bending. It's just not very impressive and some silverware is so flimsy you don't need tools to bend it. I've bent metal spoons from the dollar store by digging out ice cream that was too frozen. Fixing spoons would be a much better trick.

There was also a guy called Robert Monroe of the Institute for Psychic Research doing remote viewing experiments. I wonder if they were funded by the CIA. There was also a man called Charles Tartt complaining that conventional science "leaves out the spiritual dimension." Yeah, because it can't be measured or experimented with. Applied theology is ethics, not the Force. 

Podcast summary

Jeb and Blake described this episode as a "love letter to the 1970s". 

"We've got Edgar Mitchell, we've got the Moon. We're ready for some serious science."

Jeb reiterates some points he made in the Bigfoot episode about how in the 20th century ideas from theosophy and occultism about psychic powers and spiritual planes and beings and what not get reinterpreted as a subject for science. Instead of mustachioed gentlemen in tweed practicing meditation in order to commune with fairies or something, you get cryptozoologists measuring footprints and parapsychologists trying to find ghosts on the electromagnetic spectrum. 

They also don't like JJ Abrams' take on Star Trek, joking that JJ in the elementary school was Abrams and saying he figured out ESP  by blinding Nimoy with lens flare. They also note that one kid is doing poorly and bring up the idea of a negative psychic reaction, an idea some so-called psychics come up with when suddenly their powers don't work when James Randi is around. 

Although judging by this picture of him with Penn Jillette, it's clear that Randi was some kind of archmage. Look at that staff! 

They also question the logic of using cards to test psychic abilities when so many psychics are trained as magicians and thus are skilled at manipulating cards. 

Blake wondered if there was a connection to Tarot cards and Jeb mentioned it's difficult to buy Zenner cards that aren't marked. 

They also comment on the Faith Healing-esque spoon bending guy and note he's not the Lawrence Kennedy from the Firesign Theater. They also mentioned that Uri Geller claimed he was asked to demonstrate spoon bending to an intelligence agency. 

"Spoon bending can be a passport to a life of leisure even more than an English degree," Blake said. 

(Blake: "You know there's a saying among people with English degrees." Jeb: "Oh, God." Blake: "Do you want fries with that?")

Finally they discussed some creepy-looking lab set ups involving middle aged male professors going into secluded parapsychology labs with female undergrads, turning down the lights and encouraging them to relax on the waterbed. But they also talked about the law of large numbers and confirmation bias -- there's a lot going on, which results in coincidences and it's easy to think the hits are more signifigant than they actually are while discounting misses (perhaps the biggest thing seperating science from pseudoscience is that in actual science, getting a null result that disproves the hypothesis is just as good as producing some data points that confirm it). 

Although, obviously, when I look at my phone a split-second before I get an email notification it's because I have ESP and not because I look at my phone too much and get too many emails.