sensory interaction the principle that one sense may influence another, as when the smell of food influences its taste.

IMMERSIVE LEARNING Are you wondering how researchers test these kinds of questions? Try LaunchPad’s How Would You Know If a Cup of Coffee Can Warm Up Relationships?

embodied cognition the influence of bodily sensations, gestures, and other states on cognitive preferences and judgments.

ESP—Perception Without Sensation?

18-9 What are the claims of ESP, and what have most research psychologists concluded after putting these claims to the test?

Without sensory input, are we capable of extrasensory perception (ESP)? Are there indeed people—any people—who can read minds, see through walls, or foretell the future? Nearly half of Americans have agreed there are (AP, 2007; Moore, 2005).

The most testable and, for this discussion, most relevant ESP claims are

Closely linked is psychokinesis, or “mind movement,” such as levitating a table or influencing the roll of a die. (The claim is illustrated by the wry request, “Will all those who believe in psychokinesis please raise my hand?”)

If ESP is real, we would need to overturn the scientific understanding that we are creatures whose minds are tied to our physical brains and whose perceptual experiences are built of sensations. Sometimes new evidence does overturn our scientific preconceptions.

Most research psychologists and scientists have been skeptical that paranormal phenomena exist. But in several reputable universities, parapsychology researchers perform scientific experiments searching for possible ESP (Storm, 2010a, b; Turpin, 2005). Before seeing how they do so, let’s consider some popular beliefs.

Premonitions or Pretensions?

Can psychics see into the future? Although one might wish for a psychic stock forecaster, the tallied forecasts of “leading psychics” reveal meager accuracy. During the 1990s, the tabloid psychics were all wrong in predicting surprising events. (Madonna did not become a gospel singer, the Statue of Liberty did not lose both its arms in a terrorist blast, Queen Elizabeth did not abdicate her throne to enter a convent.) And the psychics have missed big-news events. Why, despite a $50 million reward, could none of them help locate Osama bin Laden after 9/11? Where were the psychics on 9/10 when we needed them? In 2010, when a mine collapse trapped 33 miners, the Chilean government reportedly consulted four psychics. Their verdict? “They’re all dead” (Kraul, 2010). But 69 days later, all 33 were rescued. After Amanda Berry went missing in Cleveland in 2003, her distraught and desperate mother turned to a famed psychic on a national television show for answers. “She’s not alive, honey,” the psychic told the devastated mom, who died without living to see her daughter’s brave escape in 2013 (Radford, 2013). According to one analysis, this result brought that psychic’s record on 116 missing person and death cases to 83 unknown outcomes, 33 incorrect, and zero mostly correct. To researcher Ryan Shaffer (2013), that’s the record of a “psychic defective.”

The psychic visions offered to police departments have been no more accurate than guesses made by others (Nickell, 1994, 2005; Radford, 2010; Reiser, 1982). Their sheer volume does, however, increase the odds of an occasional correct guess, which psychics can then report to the media. Police departments are wise to all this. When researchers asked the police departments of America’s 50 largest cities whether they ever had used psychics, 65 percent said No (Sweat & Durm, 1993). Of those that had, not one had found them helpful.

Psychics’ vague predictions sometimes sound correct when later retrofitted to match events. Nostradamus, a sixteenth-century French psychic, explained in an unguarded moment that his ambiguous prophecies “could not possibly be understood till they were interpreted after the event and by it.”

Are the spontaneous “visions” of everyday people any more accurate? Do dreams, for example, foretell the future, as people from both Eastern and Western cultures tend to believe—making some people more reluctant to fly after dreaming of a plane crash (Morewedge & Norton, 2009)? Or do they only seem to do so when we recall or reconstruct them in light of what has already happened? Two Harvard psychologists tested the prophetic power of dreams after superhero aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby son was kidnapped and murdered in 1932 (Murray & Wheeler, 1937). Before the body was discovered, they invited people to report their dreams about the child, and 1300 visionaries submitted dream reports. How many accurately envisioned the child dead? Five percent. And how many individuals also correctly anticipated the body’s location—buried among trees? Only 4 of the 1300. Although this number was surely no better than chance, to those four dreamers the accuracy of their apparent precognitions must have seemed uncanny.

Given the billions of events in the world each day, and given enough days, some stunning coincidences are sure to occur. By one careful estimate, chance alone would predict that more than a thousand times a day someone on Earth will think of another person and then, within the next five minutes, learn of that person’s death (Charpak & Broch, 2004). Thus, when explaining an astonishing event, we should “give chance a chance” (Lilienfeld, 2009). With enough time and people, the improbable becomes inevitable.

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Putting ESP to Experimental Test

When faced with claims of mind reading or out-of-body travel or communication with the dead, how can we separate bizarre ideas from those that sound strange but are true? At the heart of science is a simple answer: Test them to see if they work. If they do, so much the better for the ideas. If they don’t, so much the better for our skepticism.

This scientific attitude has led both believers and skeptics to agree that what parapsychology needs is a reproducible phenomenon and a theory to explain it. Parapsychologist Rhea White (1998) spoke for many in saying “The image of parapsychology that comes to my mind, based on nearly 44 years in the field, is that of a small airplane [that] has been perpetually taxiing down the runway of the Empirical Science Airport since 1882 … its movement punctuated occasionally by lifting a few feet off the ground only to bump back down on the tarmac once again. It has never taken off for any sustained flight.”

How might we test ESP claims in a controlled, reproducible experiment? An experiment differs from a staged demonstration. In the laboratory, the experimenter controls what the “psychic” sees and hears; on stage, the psychic controls what the audience sees and hears.

Daryl Bem, a respected social psychologist, has been a skeptic of stage psychics; he once quipped that “a psychic is an actor playing the role of a psychic” (1984). Yet he reignited hopes for replicable evidence with nine experiments that seemed to show people anticipating future events (2011). In one, when an erotic scene was about to be displayed in one of two randomly selected screen placements, Cornell University participants guessed the right placement 53.1 percent of the time (beating 50 percent by a small but statistically significant margin).

Despite Bem’s published research having survived critical reviews by a top-tier journal, other critics found the methods “badly flawed” (Alcock, 2011) or the statistical analyses “biased” (Wagenmakers et al., 2011). “A result—especially one of this importance—must recur several times in tests by independent and skeptical researchers to gain scientific credibility,” observed astronomer David Helfand (2011). “I have little doubt that Professor Bem’s experiments will fail this test.”

Anticipating such skepticism, Bem has made his computer materials available to anyone who wishes to replicate his studies. Multiple attempts have since been made, with minimal success and continuing controversy (Bem et al., 2014; Galak et al., 2012; Ritchie et al., 2012; Wagenmakers, 2014). Regardless, science is doing its work. It has been open to a finding that challenges its own assumptions. And then, through follow-up research, it has assessed its validity. And that is how science sifts crazy-sounding ideas, leaving most on the historical waste heap while occasionally surprising us.

One skeptic, magician James Randi, has had a long-standing offer of $1 million to be given “to anyone who proves a genuine psychic power under proper observing conditions” (Randi, 1999; Thompson, 2010). French, Australian, and Indian groups have made similar offers of up to 200,000 euros (CFI, 2003). Large as these sums are, the scientific seal of approval would be worth far more. To refute those who say there is no ESP, one need only produce a single person who can demonstrate a single, reproducible ESP event. (To refute those who say pigs can’t talk would take but one talking pig.) So far, no such person has emerged.