Psi Multimedia Resources Thread

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page, here's a lecture by Chris French entitled "An Introduction to Paranormal Psychology" (posted in 2016). Most of it probably won't be particularly new to people here, and there's no mention of experimental parapsychology, but I would recommend watching the demonstration starting at 37 minutes, which I did find surprising:

Two comments.
1. the video is titled ""An Introduction to Paranormal Psychology" but as the description explains, it is about "anomalistic psychology" which is by definition providing non-paranormal explanations. In that respect there is some misuse of language - an ethical concern, since it is really about debunking, not about the paranormal. One might wonder whether the intent was to convince the audience that there is "nothing to see here" and dissuade potential serious researchers.

2. The brief demonstration towards the end (37 minutes) reminds me of something else, I wish I knew where to find it. Something like filtering an audio clip to contain only certain frequencies. Or maybe it was some speech-synthesis system? At any rate, what I had in mind was similarly unintelligible until the intended text is given, then it becomes clearly recognisable. The difference though is that in that case what one is hearing is genuinely what is there, not an artefact.
Here's an example of what I mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lCxqJ-Dgug

(though the example which I had in mind was even more extreme).

The cinnamon bun's a slam dunk but I don't think he'd be quite so keen to take the mickey out of a piece of toast that resembled the prophet Mohammed, though.

Was there anything in there about NDE's ? I watched most of it.

Two comments.
1. the video is titled ""An Introduction to Paranormal Psychology" but as the description explains, it is about "anomalistic psychology" which is by definition providing non-paranormal explanations. In that respect there is some misuse of language - an ethical concern, since it is really about debunking, not about the paranormal. One might wonder whether the intent was to convince the audience that there is "nothing to see here" and dissuade potential serious researchers.

2. The brief demonstration towards the end (37 minutes) reminds me of something else, I wish I knew where to find it. Something like filtering an audio clip to contain only certain frequencies. Or maybe it was some speech-synthesis system? At any rate, what I had in mind was similarly unintelligible until the intended text is given, then it becomes clearly recognisable. The difference though is that in that case what one is hearing is genuinely what is there, not an artefact.
Here's an example of what I mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lCxqJ-Dgug
(though the example which I had in mind was even more extreme).

I wonder whether it was called "paranormal" rather than "anomalistic" mainly because people would have a better idea of what the former meant. Coincidentally, soon after I posted that, he sent an email to his Psychology of the Paranormal mailing list, saying he would be giving "my introduction to anomalistic psychology talk" to Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub. Presumably it's his standard talk.

Although I think he usually comes across as fairly reasonable, listening to him for 40 minutes I did feel it was misleading to explain all these psychological quirks that can cause people to misinterpret spontaneous happenings, but not to mention that parapsychologists do carefully designed experiments on psi to which those explanations don't apply, and often get positive results.

I wonder whether it was called "paranormal" rather than "anomalistic" mainly because people would have a better idea of what the former meant. Coincidentally, soon after I posted that, he sent an email to his Psychology of the Paranormal mailing list, saying he would be giving "my introduction to anomalistic psychology talk" to Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub. Presumably it's his standard talk.

Although I think he usually comes across as fairly reasonable, listening to him for 40 minutes I did feel it was misleading to explain all these psychological quirks that can cause people to misinterpret spontaneous happenings, but not to mention that parapsychologists do carefully designed experiments on psi to which those explanations don't apply, and often get positive results.

I hadn't noticed there is a separate video of the question and answer session after the talk, where he is asked whether there is any evidence for psi that he can't explain "rationally," and acknowledges that there is experimental evidence, though he thinks it is probably down to questionable research practices.



However, he does mention two cases covered in TV documentaries that made him wonder. One involved an apparent reincarnation case in Scotland and the other the apparently precognitive paintings of David Mandell.

I think these are the documentaries he means:

(1) The Boy Who Lived Before:



(2) The Man Who Paints The Future:

https://vimeo.com/2315112

(2) The Man Who Paints The Future:

https://vimeo.com/2315112

Unfortunately that's only the first 8 minutes. The rest doesn't seem to be available online.

Courtesy of David Metcalfe's "Psi in the News" - here's a long interview with Mary Rose Barrington of the SPR, by Gayle Kimball:

The latest Skeptiko podcast features Courtney Brown, and is entitled "The Future of Scientific Remote Viewing":
https://skeptiko.com/courtney-brown-the-...ewing-421/

The associated discussion thread is here:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/co...-421.4389/

Unfortunately that's only the first 8 minutes. The rest doesn't seem to be available online.

Someone kindly sent me a private message saying that there was more information about David Mandell in the thesis of Chris French's former  student, Louie Savva, which is available here:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/41be/a5...e6d96e.pdf

It seems Savva started parapsychology research expecting to find experimental confirmation, and did research for a Ph.D. supervised by French, and afterwards spent several years as a postdoctoral researcher, but ended up disillusioned with the field and became quite a vocal critic. Some more information about him can be found in this mind-energy.net discussion from 2008:
https://forum.mind-energy.net/forum/skep...psychology

An archived copy of Savva's explanation can be found here. He says he wasn't going to finish writing up his thesis, but was finally motivated to do so "in the hope that I might dissuade others who are interested in the question of the paranormal, from pursuing it any further." (From internal evidence, it doesn't actually seem to have been finished until 2014.)
https://web.archive.org/web/201902241431...ology.html

Anyhow, details of Savva's investigation of David Mandell can be found in Chapter 5 and Appendix B. It was the statistical analysis that particularly intrigued me. The procedure was 40 of Mandell's "best" pictures were provided, together with details of the events that he believed they related to. Then Savva searched news archives and found 40 alternative events which also resembled the pictures. These were then submitted to judges (with some attempt at blinding, though the circumstances partly defeated it), who were asked to rate the similarity of the pictures to both Mandell's events and the alternative events. Their responses were analysed to see whether the similarity ratings for Mandell's events were significantly higher.

I don't think it's at all easy to come up with a valid statistical test for data like these, but from the test that was actually done I think it would be hard to conclude anything, whatever the results. Obviously a lack of statistical significance doesn't necessarily mean there's no difference. It can just mean your procedure doesn't have enough statistical power. There's a particular difficulty in this case. While in some cases Mandell's events came several years after the paintings, on average they were reasonably close (range 1 day to 8 years, median 12 months). But in contrast, Savva allowed himself a much longer period to choose his alternative events from. About three quarters of the alternative events were later than the paintings, and for those the range was 14 months to 10 years, median 6-7 years. About a quarter were earlier than the paintings, with range 20 months to 52 years, median 12 years.

So even if the comparison had shown no significant difference between the similarity to the paintings of Mandell's events and Savva's alternative events, I think it would have been difficult to conclude anything. But anyway, that wasn't the case. Of the 40 comparisons, 31 were rated more similar to Mandell's events, with the difference being statistically significant (p<0.05) in 7 cases, and extremely small p values in some cases (0.0001 and 0.0002 for the two pictures interpreted as showing the Twin Towers). Nevertheless, after some further discussion, Savva's conclusion was that Mandell did not have precognitive dreams of the future. Savva thought the matching of targets was the result of "subjective validation" on Mandell's part.

My own feeling is that the only basis for an objective judgment about Mandell's pictures would be a valid statistical test, fixed in advance. Without that, any opinion is bound to be subjective.

(Edit: I meant to add that Louie Savva's thesis is 234 pages long and reports on several different studies, so there is plenty of other potentially interesting stuff in there. Also, for people who would like a closer look at some of David Mandell's pictures, the seven pictures for which the Mandell events were rated significantly cmore similar than the alternative events, are reproduced in the appendix.)

There's another interesting discussion about Louie Savva from 2006 here, in which he takes part himself:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/for...hp?t=70319

He takes the position that parapsychology is nonsense but that the onus isn't on him to provide evidence for that assertion, which seems a bit unreasonable to me. At least given that he's actively trying to persuade other people that it's nonsense, and also presenting his approach as scientific.

His comment there on the David Mandell work was:
"Although we couldn't empirically test his claim, plenty of events (past and future) matched most of his pictures."

Another presentation from ParaMOOC2019 has been released:

Alexander Moreira-Almeida. "Mind-Body Independent and Survival of Death", 11 May: