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Current Experimental Parapsychology- EEG and Imaging Evidence of Psy Phenomena!
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| PETRAN |
"Prapsychology", a discipline often considered to be at best a pseudo-science and at worst a bad hoax. This is no strange, since "parapsychology" is often associated with stage performers that do fancy circus tricks, new-age crackpot ideas, power-crystals, spiritual healing, aliens, UFOs, Intelligent Design, Harry Potter and the evil spaghetti monster, plus Chuck Norris (since this man is "impossible")
Little people know though that parapsychology-which is often mistaken for mysticism, esoterism, witchcraft, new-age and various weird people on TV saying impossible things- was-and still is for that matter- a scientific discipline which uses strict experimental techniques and statistical analyses in order to test for Phenomena "Psi" (not to be mistaken with "Psy-trance", although this musical sub-genre can be considered quite "parapsychological" and "anomalous" ).
"Psi" Phenomena are what people call "anomalous experiences".That is "Telepathy" "or "inter-personal transportation of information by no physical interaction", "Clairvoyance" or "remote viewing" (to perceive a scene without one being there) and "Pre-Cognition", that is to perceive a situation/person/object before it occured. These three things are grouped under what is known as ESP, that is , "Extra-Sensory Perception" (or perception without sensation). The other "big" area of parapsychology is "Psycho-Kinesis" which looks at mind-matter interactions when no physical interaction is present.
You think that all this is bollocks? think again, because various credible universities and institutions have performed countless experiments over the years. During the cold-war period of the 60s and 70s, Stanford was known to have conducted countless experiments on "telepathy" and "clairvoyance" or "remote viewing", since, agents with the ability to control such skills would have been of great value to the Americal Goverment (the famous STARGATE research program). It seems though that results from Stanford and many other institutes were not consistent. Parapsychology - a science which never had a concrete theory behind it- underwent some severe criticism and went through some very bad periods.
Now it seems that the later fashion in psychology and cognitive experimentation, which is physiological and imaging techniques, have "come to the rescue" of various anomalous phenomena. More specifically, Marios Kittenis from Koestler Institute of Edinburgh university has demonstrated that when a "sender" who is connected to an electro-encephalography unit (EEG-a device that records the brain's electrical activity) was projected with a bright-light, the "receiver" showed the same "alpha-wave" increase, despite the fact that the "receiver" was never stimulated with a flashinglight. Other studies have shown physiological activity in pre-cognition tests. It was demonstrated by means of Electro-dermal activity (which provides an index of physiological arousal due to emotion), that subjects had shown increased arousal before the presentation (150-200msec.) of a randomly presented arousing picture and this was not only due to anticipation. Funny thing is that when the subjects are forced to consciously state what he content of the anticipated picture will be, they don't have a clue. It is like their brains and bodies implicitly or unconsciously "sense" the incoming information.
Some imaging studies that employed fMRI (a device that provides pictures of the "working" human brain in action) have also demonstrated that the "receiver's" occipital-visual" cortexes were activated when a "sender" was presented with a flashing light (whose occipitalvisual cortex was also activated), despite the fact that the receiver was never projected with a light of any sorts (Standish et al., 2003, Richards et al. 2005).
A huge meta-analysis on studies of telepathy conducted between 1974 (or somethin) and 1997 has shown that the chance of the current phenomenon to occur was "33%", which is higher than the "25%" that was expected if the phenomenon only occured by chance (since in these studies subject choose 1 out of 4 cards, or 1 out of 4 videos). Other meta-analyses conducted on various other areas such as pre-cogniton, remote viewing and psycho-kinesis have also demonstrated similar results.
Some quantum theories of consciousness that fastly emerge seem to account for these non-local phenomena. Marios Kittenis has reviewed many psychological and physical factors that correlate with these phenomena, such as personality traits which are characteristic of extroverts, increased creativity, belief in the paranormal, "holistic" rather than "analytic" thinking, decreased geo-magnetic activity of the earth, and the sidereal time of 13.45. in which paranormal phenomena have a 200% increase for two hours. He is not sure himslelf what all these things mean, bu the facts that they exist is quite encouraging.
CoR Version: A statistical revision of countless parapsychological experiments have demonstrated that anomalous phenomena such as ESP (telepathy, pre-cognition etc.) have a higher-than-chance probability to occur. Techniques that record brain activity have demonstrated that brain areas are activated when a "sender" sends telepathic information to a "receiver" (telepathy) or before the presentation of a stimulus (pre-cognition).
But read my post heh. What do you think on parapsychology you "anomalous" TA people? |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| so when are these test subjects going to claim their 2 million dollar prize from the sceptics foundation for provable extra-sensory perception? ;) |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by pinkbubblegum
*yawn :o |
must be that "intellectual bull" you're so afraid of. |
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| pinkbubblegum |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
must be that "intellectual bull" you're so afraid of. |
Nah, I'm tired. |
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| PETRAN |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
so when are these test subjects going to claim their 2 million dollar prize from the sceptics foundation for provable extra-sensory perception? ;) |
Does it exist? for real? They can go there with their fMRI brain-scans lol. "Look , this is me doing ESP"! |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by PETRAN
What do you think on parapsychology you "anomalous" TA people? |
As long as it doesn't appeal to the existence of supernatural entities, I've got no problem with that. I still don't think the results yelded by the experiments are convincing, however... |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by PETRAN
Does it exist? for real? They can go there with their fMRI brain-scans lol. "Look , this is me doing ESP"! |
Yeah, the money exists. They are going to pull the pin on it sometime in the next few years though. And no, they'll need to be tested by the skeptics first haha.
hang on a second.....
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For ten years, skeptic magician James Randi has offered a million dollars to "anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event." He's just announced that the James Randi Educational Foundation is discontinuing the Million-Dollar Challenge two years from now. The money will be freed, he says, "to generally add to our flexibility" and enable the group "to do many more projects." From his note on the matter:
Now, we’re sure that there will be those who will offer all kinds of objections to this decision – though they could have simply applied and won the prize. There will be accusations that the JREF is concerned about the safety of the prize money – which was never any sort of concern, I can assure you – and there will be more claims that the money was never there in the first place. I can see the professionals out there sighing in relief that they no longer have to answer questions about why they won’t take the prize, and they’ll just wait out the remaining period that the prize is available. All that’s to be expected.
Ten years is long enough to wait. The hundreds of poorly-constructed applications, and the endless hours of phone, e-mail, and in-person discussions we’ve had to suffer through, will be things of the past, for us at the JREF.
Those who believe they have mystic powers now have two full years to apply… Let’s see what happens. |
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/0...ptic-james.html |
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| PETRAN |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
Yeah, the money exists. They are going to pull the pin on it sometime in the next few years though. And no, they'll need to be tested by the skeptics first haha.
hang on a second.....
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/0...ptic-james.html |
Haha cool.
What about all these experiments though. these seem like hard evidence to me.
Thing is that such phenomena seem to be very small and scientists still don't exactly know when and under what exact circumstances do they occur (although there are some factors that i list).
Plus, some of these experiments show an "implicit/unconscious" influence on behaviour which canno't be consciosuly reported (brain activation of visual areas without the subject clearly seeing anything) or the increase of arousal before the picture.
These factors alone could make the clear-cut conscious report of ESP problematic.
This thing that various "magicians" claim that they have "special powers" is bollocks. These exerimental conditions seem to show very subtle effects to occur between any two individuals which are emotionaly or physically connected somehow, or any individual who is presented with stimuli. The phenomenon seems to be there, but it is very weak. The question is when , how and why? |
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