Statistical Studies of Psychic Phenomena

This experiment studied prayer in relation to the recovery from heart bypass operations. About 1200 patients received prayer from nuns for 14 days, half being told they would receive prayer and half being told that they may or may not get prayer. Another 600 were the control group and did not receive prayer even though they were told they may or may not be prayed for. The result made no difference in the survival rate (Benson, and all 2006).​ This confirmed an experiment done by the Mayo Clinic (Aviles and all, 2001).

A study which might have a chance of showing something would involve testing if emotional propagation works apart from the social network demonstrated by Christakis and Fowler (2009). This would require:

1. The people doing doing a healing ritual have some sort of emotional connection to the victims either directly or via a close friend.

2. Focused feelings (considerations) were generated

3. The healing involved something which is also affected by the placebo effect.

References

The lowest level of correspondence was reported by the skeptical group who did not believe anyone had psychic abilities. Of these, 53% reported a very low level of image correspondence while only 4% thought their mental image had a high correspondence. In contrast the open minded group who believed that psychic abilities might exist showed a normal Gaussian distribution (bell curve) with 31% indicating a medium correspondence and about 17% indicating either a very low or very high image correspondence. This trial really shows the effect of confirmation bias. The skeptic group was determined to nullify the idea that visual telepathy exists. The open minded group showed a response typical of pure randomness.​

The other four trials were a more objective test of image telepathy although they had the weakness of group-think bias because all participants could see everyone else’s choices as they came in on the Twitter feed. About 1000 participants had to guess which one out of four digital images represented the location of the psychic sender. The group as a whole did not identify any image correctly and neither did the group who claimed to have psychic ability and were confident about it. The only group which managed to identify one image correctly (just above chance level) was the group which claimed psychic ability but were not confident about their choice.

Remote psychic viewing has never been proven. Even the classified Stargate project run by the U.S. security establishment could find no evidence for its existence. That project began in 1978 and it was closed in 1995 with its information declassified. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project)

References