Skyscript Astrology Forum

Some new parapsychology research has emerged which should interest Skyscript members. Daryl Bem of Cornell University has released a paper , ?Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect,? in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In short the research indicates human capacity to anticipate future information before it is available above statistical probability. Those interested in parapsychology wil be aware there has been several several pieces of research indicating this already. Whats different this time is that even the sceptics have so far conceded the methodology of the research was flawless.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... ished.html

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/ ... -possible/

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... re-psychic

You can access a pre-print of the article from Daryl Bem?s website on this link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8290411/FeelingFuture.pdf

The full article will appear later this year.

Mark

This is old news Mark. I read the article months ago in the British Museum.
It was in Dr Dee's obsidian scrying mirror.

Matt

Matt wrote:

This is old news Mark. I read the article months ago in the British Museum. It was in Dr Dee's obsidian scrying mirror.

Ah Hah! Did you notice any other news stories in the scrying mirror that haven't hit the headlines yet?

Mark

Erm.... It is starting to go cloudy now.

Can you wait 'til my medium returns from his holiday? He is touring Prague and is exploring the cellars and crypts in the picturesque buildings that the city is famous for.

No return date as yet but before the Aries Ingress God willing.

Matt

I found this material very interesting. I think astrology does rely on those intuitive parts of the brain that are poorly understood.

Just a few of cautionary notes. One is that a single study does not proven scientific fact make. The facts of a single study are embedded within its own research design, and may or may not be broadly transferable to other samples and populations. As the links indicated, other behavioural scientists need to get busy and develop an ample, solid body of research, involving many similar experiments in many different settings. Sometimes when this happens, the results of an initial study using the same research design cannot be replicated. So I would view this study as intriguing and suggestive, but as a first step in the process.

The other cautionary note concerns statistics. My one university statistics course was long ago and far away; but basically, with a large sample, a small variance from the expected norm or average can be statistically significant (i.e., unlikely to have occurred by chance alone.) So the difference in a binary system of 50% vs. 53% may be statistically significant, but to me, the question is what happened with those subjects who fell into the unanticipated 3%, because 47% of the subjects did not show any unusual ability. (Assuming I read the materials correctly, which is always in question! )

Just possibly psi abilities are comparable to other sorts of talents. Not everyone has a gift for languages, perfect pitch, or artistic abilities. Or we might think in terms of the Meyers-Briggs test, where some individuals score extra high on the intuitive and feeling scales.

Then you have to look at the study design itself. I was surprised that it involved showing student subjects erotic pictures, apparently of couples in sexual positions. I don't think my former university would have let this through the committee on research with human subjects, but you never know! Students were told they should opt out of the study if they didn't want to look at such pictures; but then, that might have self-excluded deeply religious students, or possibly a few feminists. Apparently the rationale was that erotic pictures would heighten students' interests and sensitivities to the images, and more definitively draw out subjects with psi abilities.

On the other hand, one might expect students with deep religious convictions to score pretty high, as well. A researcher couldn't conduct such a study in much of the Muslim world nor, probably, among evangelical Christians in the American South; suggesting a kind of cultural bias inherent in this type of research. Whether it would affect the results might be determined through studies among these populations using different types of images.

The question would be, then, how representative the student sample would be at the end of the day; although it is extremely common for psychology majors voluntarily to participate in their professors' studies. Questions about the efficacy of on-line surveys are still under discussion in the academy, because this type of survey is still fairly new. At issue is simply whether design flaws (if any) might skew the results.

Anyway, thanks for positing this, Mark, and we should all stay tuned.