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Kindly note that I am not affiliated with the JREF, nor is my claim or this investigation, and that I do not represent their organization. The JREF considers my TAM demonstration to hold no weight for or against the claim, regardless of the results, and still welcomes me to apply for a JREF test in the usual way in which such an application is made, would I choose to do so. Meanwhile, I do hold the inaccuracy in my first choice answer as evidence against the claim.
The James Randi Educational Foundation JREF invited me to participate in The Amaz!ng Meeting TAM8 of this year 2010, to do a simple demonstration of my paranormal claim of medical perception.
See large parts of the TAM demonstration More pictures from the TAM test
What is the claim?
Demonstration design and setup
This TAM demonstration follows a very simple design and setup. Five persons sit in a row of chairs on stage. Their chairs are turned around, so that their backs are exposed, and they are leaning against the backrest of the chair. Each chair is numbered from 1 to 5 both at the front on the floor, and at the back of the chair. No screens are used, and the persons wear their own personal clothing.
I sit in a chair behind the row of the five persons. No set distance between myself and the row of persons is defined, but I choose to keep a distance of about 2 or 3 feet I think. No touching or speaking is allowed, or necessary.
I am given 6 minutes of time to look at each person. All five persons are available to be seen at all times throughout the demonstration. I take 6 minutes to look at a person, and if I finish early I choose to go back and look at the prior persons, meanwhile I chose not to look at the persons yet to come further in line just in case that would be bad protocol. Banachek lets me know when there is one minute remaining, and again when there is 30 seconds remaining of each 6 minutes.
At the end of each 6 minute session, I turn the chair around and am asked a question by Banachek about my claim. For each next session, I move the chair to the next person in line and have another 6 minutes.
The exact design of the demonstration was not described to me until only a moment before the 5 o'clock segment which contains the JREF discussing their paranormal challenge and my TAM demonstration. So it was a bit improvised, and simple. This procedure is much less scientifically rigorous than what I would normally require, but still provided a valuable experience with the claim and a learning opportunity.
Comments on the design of the demonstration
I would like to have some screens Larger persons were ok this time! So I notice that every individual is differently difficult for me to feel into to form perceptions, and the factors that determine who will be and who won't seems hard for me to identify in advance. I can not at this time provide a general description which would predict who would be more difficult in a test than others, and so this concern may not be possible to address during test arrangements, in which case we must consider to allow me to pass on such "difficult" persons during a test. Note that I identify these issues around an individual during a test, and not afterwards based on the results of the test.
Time Verification of accuracy
Demonstration statistics
I did however choose to indicate in my personal notes and in the answer I gave the sides, left and right, of my perceptions. This makes the odds 1 in 10 of getting the correct answer, as there are a total of ten possible spaces in which the kidney could be missing. Successfully passing a 1 in 10 test is also not sufficient to provide evidence in favor of the claim, unless, again, added to a series of repeated tests done on separate occasions.
The JREF who arranged this demonstration for me, chose to disregard any relevance of how I perceived the left and right sides of the persons. Meanwhile for my own reasons of learning more about the claim, I do look at this also.
I look at not only the accuracy of my answers, but also on how consistent and clear they have been. I also consider any other comments or observations that I make during a reading. Meanwhile I do accept that any comments or thoughts that arise after the results of a test have been announced, lack the same credibility to be considered with as much weight, and must be suspected of being tainted by the knowledge of the right answers - whether done intentionally or subconsciously.
The results
The notes
I numbered each of the five pages with 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th respectively, in their upper left margins, to correspond to each person. Each page got two columns similarly, one titled Left, the other next to it titled Right.
Each time when I perceived the presence of a kidney, I would put an x in the left or right column. Several x's would collect, when I was perceiving a kidney repeatedly and consistently.
Here are the notes, best as I can remember them. The actual notes are now with Banachek, I think he wanted to add them into the JREF library. Copies will be provided to verify the below table:
Below are two photographs taken by a TAM attendee, of the notes of person # 1 and person # 2, before the original copies of those notes were submitted to Banachek.
Notes of person # 2. Again, marked with 2nd in the top right corner to indicate which person. Two columns, Left and Right. Left column marked with seven x's, and twice written there for independent perceptions of the presence of the left kidney. Right column had at one point two x's, which I then scratched over - yes indeed, this looks very suspicious! Meanwhile I am hopeful that video material will appear that proves that I scratched those out before the results were established, and not afterwards. I may have tried to convince myself logically that I must feel his right kidney, but before submitting my answer I had scratched those two out, because I just wasn't feeling them. Yet, even at that, two as opposed to the several when I did feel the presence of a kidney.
Here is a PDF file sent to me directly by Banachek who managed the TAM demonstration on behalf of the JREF. Credibility issue...
These two notes pictures cropped to show the relevant area without losing its magnification. Original pictures available at Notes # 1 and Notes # 2.
Credibility of notes
The results were then announced. My choice had been person # 3 and left side (although it was not required that I specify the side), and the target had been person # 2 right side.
When it was my time to leave the stage, Alison handed back my notebook. I objected, but felt like I had to take it anyway. So there I was, with notebook and pen in hand. And this is very serious. In the role of a paranormal claimant, I have zero credibility, and even I acknowledge that. A paranormal claimant in general must be suspected of wanting to defend the authenticity of their claim, and must be considered prone to tampering with the data in ways that would support the claim. I wish Alison and Banachek would have kept the notes.
I absolutely did not edit any of my notes. I neither added, or subtracted anything from any of my five notes pages. But I could have done so, had I chosen to, since I stood there for a long enough time, with the notes and pen in my hand.
Fortunately a small crowd gathered around me rather soon after I left the stage, and among them paranormal investigator, magician, and veteran skeptic Joe Nickell who by his own initiative took photographs of each of my five notes pages. His photographs at least verify the content of the pages at that point. And, the notes now reside with Banachek and the JREF, which I hold to be very credible. It is still good to have backup copies with Joe Nickell. Turns out, another TAMmer photographed pages 1 and 2 that were made available above.
But what about the time between when Alison handed me back the notes and until Joe Nickell took the photographs? Here's what I have to say to that:
A British video crew and an Australian video crew were on site video recording the demonstration, and they were most likely capturing the demonstration from a very good, close up angle. Also, at least two ladies in the front row section were video recording the demonstration. An IIG member, as well as Susan Gerbic-Forsyth. There were possibly more pictures and recordings made, some of which will hopefully show whether I did or did not edit any of the contents of the notes. To show that I didn't.
The time frame during which I would have had the opportunity to edit the information is very small. I also want to note that I am a proud sponsor of the JREF with my humble contribution from the TAM registration and JREF membership, and to offer a $5,000 amount like that is not done lightly or as a joke. Meanwhile, I know I did not tamper with the data, and hopefully the documentation of the demonstration will prove that.
I am $5,000 sure that the notes are authentic and credible, and that all of their content was produced before the results were announced. Remember, there is still plenty of documentation to review which is likely to catch me at altering the notes had I done so!
I am so sure that my notes content is credible and authentic that I can personally choose to consider them credible and to use their content in this investigation of my claim.
Wait a minute - I was going to falsify the claim!
Sadly, there is a great discrepancy between my opinions on the claim, and the opinions of others, since I do add into consideration the several personal experiences I have had with the claim in which I have experienced interesting cases of accuracy, those being anecdotal since they were not documented properly to form formal evidence around them. But still, I will always be slightly more compelled to further investigate, than can anyone else be who has only the formal documentation available.
Before the results were announced at the TAM demonstration, an audience member asked me what my confidence was on the answer, on a scale of 1 to 10. I said that I was 80% confident in my answer being person # 3 left side. And even now after finding out that the target was not person # 3 left side, I am still consistent in that my answer was as confident as 80%. This confidence level is not something I would want to change "after the fact" or in order to adjust my perceptions to seeming more accurate. The perceptions I had overall of the five persons, led me to being about 80% confident in my choice of person # 3 left side.
And I was wrong. I had not picked the target. So what did I do or say about that after the demonstration was over? When I stepped off the stage and was down in the small crowd gathering, which included two camera teams one from England the other from Australia, several renowned skeptics and other TAMmers, the video will show that I was talking about the claim possibly being falsified now since I made such a compelling answer, which was wrong.
Yes, I was talking about falsifying the claim! I was going to go home, think about how compelling my answer had been, and about how strongly that was leaning toward the falsification of that claim. It hadn't taken me many minutes off stage and after learning the results, to already be preparing in my head about the announcement on my website that the claim be falsified.
Why would I want to falsify the claim? I just want a reliable conclusion that even convinces me, and, like I have said, all it takes for me to be convinced that the claim is not what it has seemed, is for me to make a very compelling answer which represents the clearest of what the perceptions produce, and to find out that those are inaccurate.
And I would be happy with such a result. I have nothing invested in the authenticity of my claim. I do not experience or expect gaining any admiration from the prospect of having a true paranormal claim. I do not tell people that I am psychic, and thus finding out that I were not would not be experienced as a disappointment by anyone, let alone myself. I do not offer psychic readings or make any money off my claim. It does not make me feel special in any way, to think of myself as having a possible paranormal ability. And so, falsifying this claim would not hurt. I was saying to everyone there at TAM that evidence points to the claim being falsified.
But what happened next... I happened to review my notes pages, perhaps because the people gathering around me were asking to see my notes, and so I looked, and to my surprise I had seen all kidneys very clearly and consistently, except for three out of the ten possible kidneys. One of these three was person # 1 Jamie Bernstein's left kidney. I spent quite a bit of time trying to see her left kidney, and even had to return to her after finishing early on some of the other persons, and eventually I felt a small and weak detection of it, and so instead of putting any x's in her left column, I just wrote "weakly". But it was there.
Another of the three I was not seeing (although technically I did see Jamie's left kidney once, even if weakly) was person # 3's left kidney. I looked and I looked, and I never did see it. And I was also feeling a strong sense of emptiness in that area, and so I kept writing the word "empty" in his left column and repeatedly.
And the third (or second out of two) of the kidneys I never did see, was person # 2's, Hal Bidlack's, right kidney. I never did see it. But in him I did not feel the same distinct feeling of emptiness, as I was feeling in person # 3.
And when I saw in my notes, that wait a minute, I never did see the target kidney at all, that is the reason the claim is not falsified by my judgement of its overall performance, and it is why I want to have yet another test of some sort.
But it will be evident from the demonstration video, that I was indeed becoming fully prepared to falsify the claim, had it not been that I never did see the target missing kidney, and that most of the other kidneys I did confirm as present and many times. So that's what happened.
And I do hope that my actual willingness to falsify the claim, when presented to clear inaccuracy in its performance (before I realized that I had not seen the target missing kidney after all), will finally show that there really is something to my claim, test results but also personal anecdotes that were not recorded properly to make them evidence, and that keeping alive my claim is not my personal choice or perhaps preference, but is based on the evidence at hand. The claim survives a little bit longer again, but, it almost didn't.
What do I learn from this TAM demonstration?
To my initial disappointment, some of the five persons in the TAM demonstration were a bit larger. But to my pleasant surprise they were exceedingly easy for me to feel into. Rather, with this set of persons, the little lady person # 1 was the hardest for me to conclude on, with only one weak perception of her left kidney once.
So still after this TAM demonstration I still note that different individuals are differently easy or difficult for me to feel into to form perceptions, and that the cause of this difference remains unidentified, and not related to body size after all. Size may still be a contributing factor, but I find that I am now unable to describe in advance of a test, the general type of persons that I would expect to have trouble with. Therefore, in any future test, I would ask for the option to pass on a particular person that I am having a hard time to feel. Fortunately, if and when this difficulty arises, I identify it during a test. It is not something I state after the results. Also, as I have always stated, the claim is not that I would be able to detect all forms of health information and in all people, but that when I do sense something, it would be accurate. Thereby, consistent to this claim, I may be permitted to pass on persons.
Partial screens and same t-shirts! My logical thinking, the normal thought processes that process the intake of information based on prior experiences and knowledge, is also active while I am doing readings. The readings themselves are based on something entirely separate from logic, and instead use a different sense of feeling. Logic talks to me and makes a different set of suggestions, ones that are never anywhere near as accurate in predicting health information, as are my perceptions. Logic is never helpful, but can only interfere. Logic can make me hesitate on my perceived answers. Therefore it is best for a test to block out as much as possible of the information intake that logic uses and that is not necessary to the perceptions, while still enabling the amount of information that allows the perceptions.
Once when I did a reading of a skeptic and was clearly detecting that he is missing his left kidney, logic was telling me it could not be possible because the man was healthy and young and did not look ill like my logic would have then assumed that someone missing a kidney should be. My logic and perceptions were debating for a long time, and eventually it was logic that made me not write down the perception. And so it remains one of the most interesting, yet undocumented and thus anecdotal, experiences with the claim. Because I was right, he was missing a kidney.
I try to suppress logic at all times when doing a reading. This time at TAM I noticed that person # 2 was wearing a shirt that said something about the police or military. And so logic was thinking that if I pick him, the answer will be wrong and then people will taunt me for having picked someone with that shirt, because maybe due to his work he would have lost a kidney. Pushing logic aside, the perceptions repeatedly detected his left kidney, and never the right one.
And so for any future test, I do wish to use a screen that blocks out most of the visual information that logic likes to use, yet that the claim does not require in order to perceive. Also, all subjects must, as was done in the IIG test, wear similar t-shirts to not feed any material for logical deduction. This is also better scientific protocol, as the information that logic uses is also one that can provide normal, as opposed to paranormal, clues and falsely indicate a special ability when all that was done was unintentional cold reading - which is nothing paranormal at all.
I am not opposed to falsification of this claim, after all! Nopes, not the left kidney every time! We can now all rest assured in knowing that no I am not simply always choosing the left side because of somehow knowing that this is where the kidneys are most often removed. My second choice would have been person # 2 missing his right kidney. Right side!
Conclusions
Once I found out that my 80% confident choice was not the target, I begun processing where my claim goes from here. I was preparing towards the claim being falsified, evaluating this most recent data set and weighing it in with past experiences, and thinking of how to phrase the results and conclusions. And I made that very clear and it will be on the videos taken at that time below the stage, I was talking about the falsification of this claim. Contrary to many skeptics' false assumptions that this claimant do anything it can to keep the claim alive, I just want a conclusion that I find dependable and credible, and I hold no personal preference to it either being validated or falsified, or something in between. I was happy with the idea of falsifying my claim, because I had just made a very confident perception, which had turned out to not be the target of the test.
I then looked at my notes, when asked about them, and noticed that I never did see the missing target. Meanwhile, in all but three of the ten possible spaces, I detected very clearly and consistently the presence of a kidney. So it is not like I would have been vague about all of my perceptions. Standing beside a very clear and repeated detection of kidneys, noting the absence of a kidney becomes more remarkable and significant as such.
It is, believe it or not, with some disappointment that I conclude that my claim is not falsified just yet. From this TAM demonstration I have learned some more about the problems in the performance of this claim, and I can say that this will by no means be some perfect detection ability. Also, I have not excluded from consideration, that falsification still be a viable future conclusion. Yet, the data of this demonstration, indicates to me the necessity of yet another test of this claim.
Having not achieved 100% accuracy in either of the IIG test or this TAM demonstration, does reveal performance issues in this claim. Yet, the results of both of these testing occasions, indicate an accuracy somewhere in between full falsification, and full verification, yet an accuracy that is statistically significant and higher than "it should be". And, since the goal is not to find or even to claim some perfect psychic ability, but to learn more about this interesting experience I have, where I seem to be able to know hidden health information, I do intend to learn more about the claim, which now lies somewhere intermediate to falsification and verification.
Not all research hypotheses strive toward the full verification of a proposition, but is done as a process in which we learn more. I can not expect, nor did I ever, to discover some truly magical ability, yet it seems that I do have some extent of intuitive detection. Perhaps not to an extent that makes it truly impressive, but one that still makes it interesting and beyond average. In the IIG test I acchieved results that only 3 or 4 out of 100 people guessing would achieve - not impressive, but interesting. And in this simple 5 person test at TAM, I do not know how to compute the odds, but the target was one of only two or three possible ones for me out of ten possible, made more significant by the high extent to which I perceived the remaining eight or seven as present, yet having been not my first choice, but the second. This, again, by no means impressive, but interesting.
I work not to claim nor to verify some truly magical psychic skill, yet I do experience feeling and seeing these health impressions in great detail, that are not the case of guesses or assumptions derived logically, but ones which strongly occupy my internal and subjective senses of feeling and vision. I still find the record of achievement by this claim to be interesting enough, to further allow some more investigation. I wish to learn more about this experience, and in the process, I hope to illuminate the cultural place of skeptics and paranormal claimants, the way in which claims are dealt with, and what can be learned of one such a claim. The social aspect of skeptic-woo interaction is also part of my study. I have learned more about my claim in this TAM demonstration, yet I sadly conclude that my claim and this investigation requires further attention.
Skeptic's Challenge!
So, what is wrong with the notes pictures? Well? Can you see it or can you not? Probably not, but if you already thought of it all on your own, then that means you're an awesome skeptic worthy of the name.
After you review carefully, the answer is hidden in the large white area below. If you drag the cursor over the white area it will highlight the text contained in it, with the answer. Well, there may be many things wrong with those notes pictures, but there is one major one in particular that every good skeptic should notice, even without all these hints given by me. So let's see if you found it... (There is hidden text in the white space below. Place your cursor over its top left corner, hold leftclick and drag over the area to reveal the text.)
Well, turns out these pics are authentic and from some TAM guy. Proper references verifying their authenticity will be provided here later. I am waiting for a reply from the person as to whether I can associate his identity to those pictures, at which he can verify the photos best he can.
Other sources...
The TAM8 demonstration is discussed in this JREF Forum
My 2010 Demonstration is discussed in the JREF Forums, in the forum thread
The 2010 Demonstration can also be discussed in the VFF Forum, and you can also read my comments and responses to the topic there, at the 2010 Demonstration forum page. *Photos published with permission from photographers
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