23 September 2014
Written in the style of Reader’s Digest
On a 1980 episode of That’s My Line, a youthful Bob Barker explained a simple experiment to a young man in an elaborate martial arts costume. James Hydrick had previously demonstrated his supposed psychokinetic ability to flip pages in a phone book without touching them. He would receive a reward of $10,000 if he could do so again with three judges looking on and a control put in place by skeptic James Randi.
Randi believed that Hydrick was simply blowing on the pages, so he spread small Styrofoam pellets around the book to detect any air currents. After some time, Hydrick complained that the Styrofoam and the lights created static electricity and caused the pages to become heavier. The judges conceded neither that such an effect was likely nor that it should affect any psychic forces. When asked to comment after Hydrick conceded the challenge, Randi said:
“I have gone through many hundreds of these tests with many hundreds of people who claim to have psychic powers and, quite frankly, it’s more or less the same story every time. When a simple, direct, very uncomplicated protocol is used and the control is applied, the psychic forces don’t seem to be present, if indeed they are ever present at all.”1
The Amazing Randi has devoted decades to debunking anyone who claims to have paranormal abilities. He still offers a reward through his foundation for confirmed psychic power, now up to $1 million. Magicians and mentalists may be harmless entertainment, but “real” homeopaths, faith healers, and mediums can swindle the guileless and grieving out of their life’s savings.
Belief in the otherworldly preys on the frailties of the human condition: fear of death, uncertainty of the future, and desire to ascribe order and meaning to a chaotic world. It’s reassuring to believe that our day-to-day lives aren’t random and our loved ones don’t cease to exist when they die. It’s comforting to think we exert more control over the universe than we do, whether through positive thinking or tempting fate. Like following through when you throw a baseball, it’s not clear how the motion of your arm affects the ball’s trajectory after it’s already left your hand, and yet it does.
Those who have used a Ouija board will insist that they didn’t originate the movement of the planchette. Horoscopes and tarot cards are vague in order to allow the reader to fill in the blanks, but their results often seem uncanny. Everyone sees patterns in the world around them and confluences of events that might be mere coincidence or an omen of things to come. Confirmation bias, “a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions, leading to statistical errors,”2 can be a powerful indicator of the supernatural. For some, it may be easier to accept an outside force at work than to believe that our own brains act in ways we don’t realize. And those who seek to capitalize on it, according to The Amazing Randi, trade in cruelty.
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlfMsZwr8rc
2 http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/c/confirmation_bias.htm
Lauren B. Lentini 