Paul Clark

By Paul Clark, originally posted 2013.

Well, it didn’t.

The book starts with an introduction that aims to whet the appetite for a lengthy exposition of the evidence for psi.  It finishes with an attempt to outline a possible explanation for psi based on quantum entanglement.

This review will focus mainly on the evidence, with a little bit about Radin’s theoretical arguments.

Radin believes that the evidence for psi is overwhelming, and he has certainly gathered a mass of it.  I decided to Google every person and every study cited in the book to see whether his evidence really is as strong as he claims.

Let’s start with the people.  Several of those cited by Radin seem to be conscientious and trustworthy researchers about whom nobody has a bad word to say.  With others it’s not so clear-cut.  Among those he cites with approval:

• Montague Ullman’s “successful” results have been criticised as pure chance.
• Daryl Bem, Robert Jahn, Charles Honorton and Rupert Sheldrake have had their statistics picked apart – more of Sheldrake later.
• Rene Warcollier and Brenda Dunne have been accused of “creative judgement”.
• Hans Bender, Eileen Garrett, Eusapia Palladino, Joseph Rhine, Harold Sherman and Daniel Dunglas Home have been accused of out-and-out fraud.  How Radin can describe such a blatant fraud as Home as a “genuine enigma” is beyond me.
• Whatley Carington collaborated with the alleged fraudster SG Soal.
• Carington and Sir William Barrett had their interest in psi ignited when they were duped by mediums, while Frederic Myers had an affair with a medium.
• Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ tested and endorsed Uri Geller.
• Three were or are leading Theosophists (Annie Besant, Charles Leadbeater and Radin’s colleague Wallis Harman).
• Sir Oliver Lodge and Charles Richet became spiritualists.
• Puthoff and the “renowned psychic” Ingo Swann are Scientologists (Puthoff apparently staffed his lab with Scientologists).
• Leanna Standish is a naturopath who allegedly advocates detox rather than conventional drugs for patients with HIV.
• The Johrei are a new religious movement that rejects all conventional medicine.
• Roger Nelson claimed that Princeton alumni could wish away rain for their reunions – I am not joking here and I don’t think he was.
• And last but not least, Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum claimed that he could fly.

Of course, there may be objections to all of the above.  Perhaps the allegations of fraud, dodgy statistics and the like are not justified.  Just because it says something on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true.  And maybe Scientologists and spiritualists can display exemplary intellectual honesty and sound judgement in the lab.  Perhaps Puthoff and Targ were right to endorse Uri Geller.  And possibly Grinberg-Zylberbaum really could fly.

Another objection is that one shouldn’t criticise the people, one should criticise the science.  Fair enough, but a combination of Google and patience reveals that, almost without exception, the studies in this book have been subjected to detailed criticism.  I am not competent to judge these criticisms; I merely note them below.  Any reader with access to the internet can find the criticisms and follow them up, though you will have to dig as sceptical reviews rarely appear on page one of Google.

Radin, for the most part, presents his evidence without engaging with its critics, and the unwary reader could easily be overwhelmed by sheer the quantity of evidence without regard to its quality.

(But before I start, two more notes about the people in the book. Radin’s describes Susan Blackmore as a perennial sceptic about all things paranormal without mentioning that she only became one after many unsuccessful years spent trying to find evidence for psi.  He also cites physicist John Wheeler in two separate discussions without mentioning his profound antipathy towards parapsychological research.)

THE EVIDENCE

All page numbers below come from the 2006 Paraview Pocket Books paperback edition.

Page 48: Ingo Swann’s remote viewing of Jupiter was debunked by James Randi and Carl Sagan.

Page 59: Emanuel Swedenborg’s vision is of course anecdotal evidence.  He was prone to visions, including one in which the creator and sustainer of the universe graciously took the time to tell him not to eat too much.

Page 62: Daniel Dunglas Home was caught cheating at least twice.

Page 68: Warcolier’s picture experiments – allegations of creative judgement, claiming matches where there were none.

Page 69: Rhine’s research – allegations of fraud.

Page 70: Sherman’s clairvoyance experiments – allegations of fraud.

Page 72: Bender’s Belmez Faces – allegations of fraud.

Page 73: What is Sir John Eccles doing here?  I can find no evidence that he was ever interested in parapsychology.

Page 74: Leonid Vasiliev – claims that his Soviet research was halted because of a lack of results.

Page 75: Ullman’s dream telepathy – claims that his results were due to chance.

Page 76: The Apollo 14 experiment – claims that this was a fiasco.  Because an attempt to detect ESP was mistimed, it suddenly became an experiment about pre-cognition.

Page 78: Bierman’s Star Lab research – claims that the results were due to expectation bias.

Page 82: The Van Dam telepathy experiments – claims that these have been comprehensively debunked.  To be fair, Radin’s does allude to these criticisms and says that more recent tests by others have answered the critics.

Page 84: Rhine’s card experiments – claims that Rhine more or less admitted fiddling his results, though he did attempt to justify his actions.

Page 86: The Pearce-Pratt distance telepathy test – Martin Gardner claimed to have debunked this.  (This is one of very few occasions where Radin attempts to debunk the debunkers.)

Page 90: Upton Sinclair – Martin Gardner notes that these tests were not done under controlled conditions and that Sinclair identified only 65/290 hits.  Einstein, who was a friend of Sinclair’s, wrote a preface to his book that can be read as somewhat arms-length.

Page 92: Warcollier’s picture matching – attacked for creative judgement.

Page 93: Carington’s picture drawing – allegedly, when the timing was good, it was evidence of telepathy, when mis-timed, it became evidence of pre-cognition.  A case perhaps of having your cake and eating it.

Page 95: Remote viewing – one remote viewer “found” a vast but unfortunately completely non-existent mountain range on Jupiter.

Page 95: PEAR Lab – their statistics have been criticised, not by sceptics but by other parapsychologists.

From Chapter Six on, Radin supplies meta-analysis data for most of the studies he mentions.  Meta-analysis is a problematic technique that tends to exaggerate the number of positive results.  The main dangers are the file-drawer problem (positive results are more likely to be reported than negative) and the quality problem (including poor quality studies in the meta-analysis).

Radin discusses these problems and the statistical techniques that have been developed to overcome them.  I checked out what he said in Wikipedia, where a not very well sourced article confirmed much of what Radin said.  However, according to Wikipedia, there are those who assert that meta-analysis remains intrinsically flawed despite these techniques.

There is also the quality problem.  If you include poor studies in your meta-analysis, your results will be unreliable.  Given Radin’s penchant for uncritically accepting contentious data, I would regard his meta-analyses with caution.

Page 106: Psi in dreams – these experiments involved Eileen Garrett, a known fraud.

Page 107: The Maimonides dream studies – I am sorry, but the degree of creative judgement detected here is quite shocking.  Images pertaining to the crucifixion of Christ were “sent” to a sleeping subject.  When the sleeper reported a dream about Winston Churchill, this was rated a hit. (Church-hill, get it?  Christ was crucified on a hill.)

Page 115: The Ganzfeld Studies – these receive a full ten pages and Radin describes them as being as close to perfect psi experiments as you can get.  However, they have been fairly comprehensively mauled by Ray Hyman and others who have criticised their methodology, procedures, controls and statistics, saying that other studies have either been inadequate or have failed to replicate.  Radin does refer to the lengthy debate that rages over Ganzfeld.

Page 125: The sense of being stared at – this question has become associated with Rupert Sheldrake, a brilliant and controversial figure lionised by some and regarded as a charlatan by others.

These tests tend to work if carried out by a believer but not if carried out by a sceptic.  It has been suggested that this is because scepticism interferes with the morphic fields.  A simpler explanation could be experimenter effect.  (Incidentally, some parapsychologists have claimed that the difficulty in replicating psi results is due to the fact that the more a psychic phenomenon is examined, the weaker it gets: a kind of morphic resonance in reverse.)

Sheldrake’s statistics have been criticised by parapsychologist Dick Berman.  Sheldrake (allegedly) has form for misinterpreting his statistics.  He collaborated with Steven Rose on an unrelated experiment in the late 1980s but they disagreed about how to interpret the statistics.  Rose arranged an independent assessment, which validated his interpretation and criticised Sheldrake’s.

In 2004, the Psychological Association ran three studies on this question, the third designed in collaboration with Sheldrake.  These studies found no evidence of a sense of being stared at.

Page 131: The DMILS studies – these have been heavily criticised for experimenter effect.  Critics allege that the lower quality the study, the better the results.

Page 137: ECG studies – we start off with “flying man” Grinberg-Zylberbaum and naturopath Standish, who reports her experiments in the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine.  These studies have been criticised for post-hoc data mining and the “psi assumption” – anything that is not chance is seen as evidence of psi, with no effort to exclude other possibilities before making this claim.

Radin’s graph on page 141 is one of his least convincing.  I have no idea what it is supposed to demonstrate.  (His use of graphs in The Conscious Universe has been criticised statistically by Bob Carroll.  I am not competent to judge these criticisms or to say whether they apply to Entangled Minds.)

Page 142: Gut feelings – I find this his most confusing and confused chapter and the graph on page 144 particularly opaque.  Unable to comment.

Page 147: Psychokenesis with dice – Radin’s meta-analysis has been criticised for including studies so small that they are statistically meaningless.

Page 154: The PEAR studies – there are serious disputes about statistics here.  Radin talks about replication in 258 studies and 127 controls.  CEM Hansel says that 71 studies provide support and 261 provide no support, but these have been bundled together in a meta-analysis that – hey presto! – provides support.

One operator in the PEAR studies took part in 15% of trials but produced 50% of hits.  If you exclude him, the results are pretty negative.  Perhaps he was particularly psychic.  Perhaps he intuited the pattern behind the random number generator (which is only pseudo-random).  Or possibly there is another explanation.

Page 161: Presentiment – one of the two meta-analyses presented here has been criticised.

Page 164: Presentiment – Bob Carroll disputes Radin’s interpretation of the results.

Page 171: Worms “very nearly” have presentiment.  Doesn’t very nearly = not?

Page 172: Presntiment in the heart – this study was published in the journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.  I recognise that this is a reason to raise an eyebrow rather than to dismiss the study outright.

Page 176: Bierman’s brain – this was first published in the Daily Mail (raised eyebrow) and has been criticised as due to expectation bias.

Page 183: Field consciousness experiments – these were inspired by the extraordinarily creative effects of group brainstorming.  But of course recent research indicates that individual brainstorming is more creative.

Page 185: Healing experiments – I have been unable to track these down and have only come across similar studies where the same researchers posted negative results.

Page 195: The Global Consciousness Project – here we have eleven pages of what Bob Carroll calls the psi assumption.  What evidence is there that RNG fluctuations were in any way associated with events like Diana or Mother Teresa’s funerals?  If RNG fluctuations occur during an event, they are evidence of psi.  If they occur before, they are evidence of psi (precognition).  Is this not unfalsifiable data mining?

RADIN’S IDEAS ON QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT

Radin believes that quantum entanglement is the most likely explanation for psi.  His argument is that our brains are entangled with the rest of the universe.  I have zero expertise in quantum mechanics and can only note that this is not the standard view, which is that quantum entanglement only happens under carefully controlled conditions when very small numbers of particles are isolated from random interaction with the rest of the world.  Under less controlled conditions, entanglement breaks down.

Radin’s world view is holistic and entangled and has quantum effects at the macro level.  This is what Victor Stenger has described as “quantum quackery”.  According to Robert Novella, the conventional formulation of quantum mechanics does not violate a view of the universe which is reductionist, discrete, local and non-holistic at the macro level with no fundamental role for human consciousness.

Radin is at pains to stress that he is not at the whacky end of the psi community.  He is not arguing for the existence of poltergeists, levitation, thetans or whatever.  He sincerely seeks genuine scientific proof of the existence of psi and believes that it has already been found and that it is clear, unambiguous and overwhelming.  Only the dogmatism of the so-called sceptics prevents them seeing this.

As a non-scientist armed with only Google, I have found evidence that this is not the case.  Almost all of the studies in this book have been contested.  In many instances, I am not competent to judge the arguments, but in some instances, I know enough to see Radin’s willingness to accept evidence that is, frankly, dodgy.  Only his own confirmation bias prevents him from seeing the poverty of this evidence, and the fact that he presents it brings his judgement into question.

He fails to respond to the sceptical evaluation of the evidence for psi by figures like Bob Carroll, who attacked his previous book The Conscious Universe in great detail in Skeptical Enquirer (Carroll has also reviewed this book), and Ray Hyman, David Marks, Jim Allcock, Susan Blackmore and CEM Hansel, who have critiqued individual studies.

Radin also ignores those parapsychologists who disagree with him and openly admit that the evidence for psi is inconsistent, almost impossible to reproduce and fails to meet normal scientific standards.  Dick Bierman writes of correlations that are diffucult to replicate.  Walter Lacadou says parapsychologists are faced with “an erosion rather than an accumulation of evidence”.  For JE Kennedy, there are “a few very impressive cases among a much larger number of unsuccessful results”.

Susan Blackmore spent decades searching for evidence of psi but abandoned the effort when she came to believe that the reason why the evidence for psi is so poor is that there isn’t anything there.  Nothing in this book has given me any reason to believe that she is wrong.