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.   

  

Episode Eleven: Psychic Detectives

 Episode summary: Can the finest psychics in St Louis help the police solve a murder? No, not really. 

Bike summary: 2.6 miles, 133.2 calories

This episode has a great opening, especially in light of the awareness (and over-glamorization) of forensic and scientific criminal investigation techniques popularized by the CSI franchise. A psychic detective called Peter Hurkos plays with some evidence with his bare hands while Leonard Nimoy asks in voiceover, "Can ESP be used to fight crime and find missing persons?"

We'll see more of this later with episodes about ghosts and some other things, but I think that the most entertaining episodes of this show are when it embraces the extremes of the TV documentary -- the highly fact based ones and the ones like this, where they put the cart before the horse and go with it. At no time do they ask "Does ESP exist?" anymore than they asked if Atlantis existed. It's like a window into a parallel 1970s where the paranormal is as ordinary and its uses as ubiqtuous as the internet is today.

From Hurkos the scene moves to Saint Louis, where some people regularly get together as the Psychic Rescue Squad. Most of the episode follows Bevy Jeagers, founder of the Rescue Squad. After a woman was murdered, police were unable to findf the body and the family asked the police to bring in Jeagers . . . who didn't find the body, either. In the episode they recreate how the police brought her to a range, where they let her get in the victim's car. She claimed she went into a kind of psychic trance and experienced the woman's last moments, a blow across the head and impressions of horses and streams. Then she drove around the suburbs known for horses until they gave up -- but they said that where they gave up driving was a bridge over a stream, while the body was discovered a few days later in a creek downstream of that bridge. 

It really isn't a lot to build an episode on, especially since it's clear that the psychics aren't allowed anywhere near the actual case. "Evidence" obtained by psychic means would be inadmissable in court, possibly causing a mistrial, nor could it be used as probable cause to obtain a warrant. The other problem with it is that they kind of fail to really explore how psychic abilities could be used to fight crime. 

Finding bodies and missing persons is all well and good, but it's kind of a niche application. Many times, we see psychics have to be able to touch things that belong to victims -- but crimes like embezzlement or money laundering don't even need the money to pass through the hands of the criminal. Similarly, they never show how the psychics would use their abilities to establish any facts that would be used to convict someone. 

Say you're trying to prove that X murdered Y on the night of July 10. You need a victim, a cause of death, a time of death, a weapon and an indication that X handled the weapon. Even that doesn't establish that X even killed Y. To prove a murder, you also need to prove that X and Y had a history of some sort, that X, even in a state of passion, was capable of making rational decisions (or at least of understanding the consequences of their actions). You also need to prove that Y wasn't the aggressor, that some freak accident didn't happen. There are a lot of things that go into a murder investigation just to establish a plausible or likely sequence of events -- and that doesn't begin to go into actually convincing a jury (well, some juries mighty be more easily convinced than others).

Podcast Summary

Blake sums up the episode nicely by describing the Psychic Rescue Squad as "If the Babysitters' Club had psychic powers" (I'm sure this a Scholastic YA series, by the way). 

They also describe it as looking like an adult extension course. I didn't live through it myself, but I feel like some community college probably did offer courses in ESP. 

They talk a lot about psychics and others don't charge for their services, but accept donations and how this is because of consumer protection laws -- if a psychic can't prove they have psychic powers despite advertising that they do, they can be sued or arrested for fraud. I did not know that, I know a lot of times they say they can't charge for using their putative powers for various mystical reasons (this isn't neccesarrily obfusication -- the clergy of many religions don't technically charge for performing the rites, which is simony in Christianity). 

They mentioned they found a treasure trove of information about the Sally Lucas case, but no mention of psychics involved in it. As I pointed out in my episode summary, psychic "evidence" is inadmissible in court, so that's not unexpected.  

Blake and Jeb also pointed out that Peter Hurkos was a fraud.        

As we all found it in the 90s, no one could have foreseen the closure of the Psychic Friends' Network. 

Take it away, Miss Cleo!