Fact or fiction: Psychism debunked

Claire Pella

If you type the word “psychic” into the Google text bar, you’ll find all sorts of links to sites offering psychic readings, psychic tests and guidance on how to develop your own psychic powers.

The only would-be objective discussion of psychism that turns up is a Wikipedia article on the subject, suggesting that most people are more interested in utilizing psychism than in understanding it.

According to a survey conducted by the U.S.-based Gallup Organization in 2005, 41 per cent of the Americans polled believed in extra-sensory perception, or ESP; 26 percent believed in clairvoyance and 31 per cent believed in telepathy or another means of psychic communication. Well and good — but what is meant by the term “psychism?” What does being a “psychic” actually entail?

Though belief in paranormal phenomena has existed for millennia, attempts to study these phenomena scientifically are a recent occurrence. One thing, however, that a century of research on parapsychology has achieved is the development of parapsychological terminology. “Psychism,” then, is an umbrella term used to describe the ability to interact with one’s environment through channels other than the five physical senses.

More specifically, psychics are believed to possess either a type of ESP (a category which includes telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition) or psychokinesis (the ability to physically affect your environment or other beings through use your mind). Whether or not paranormal phenomena are evidence of psychic abilities has long been the subject of heated debates.

Parapsychologists essentially attempt to reproduce allegedly psychic events under controlled conditions. However, there are many difficulties associated with this process, including the necessity of making sure that there are no external sensory clues or forces that could have the same effect as genuine psychic activity.

If you’re trying to establish that a subject is capable of, say, communicating directly with another mind, rather than having to use his or her physical senses, then the last thing you want to do is give the subject physical hints through word choice or facial expression. If this should happen, it invalidates the entire experiment.

Critics of parapsychology argue that, more often than not, this is precisely what does happen. As well as unconscious sensory clues, there are any number of other factors that can distort an experiment, such as insufficient control of variables (i.e. a card deck is not thoroughly shuffled, thus skewing the experiment) and errors in data analysis.

Parapsychology’s dependency on a small number of “psychically gifted” individuals as subjects is also a major stumbling block, because it denies these experiments repeatability — that is, the ability to consistently produce similar results when conducted on different subjects.

But the most controversial of the sceptics’ arguments — and one, incidentally, which seems to crop up fairly often — is the suggestion that the parapsychologists who conduct psychic experiments are biased. These investigators, their opponents argue, want to believe that the phenomena they’re studying have psychic causes. Because of this, they are more likely to be gullible, to seize upon the psychic explanation without examining other possibilities, to make subconsciously motivated errors and — most controversially — to deliberately falsify evidence.

Parapsychologists generally respond that psychic experiments are neither more nor less likely to be biased or fraudulent than other scientific experiments. They also argue that the skeptics in fact habour their own bias, which makes them unwilling to concede that paranormal phenomena could have psychological causes.

Parapsychology, they suggest, challenges our current understanding of reality at a very basic level, and so elicits an automatic and vehement rejection from those who don’t want to consider its implications.

It is undeniable that parapsychological research suffers from certain shortcomings. However, it’s also true that if the results of some of these experiments in psychism could be verified, they would have important implications for how we understand reality in general, and individual consciousness in particular. It’s to be hoped that through non-partisan, rational, open-minded research, we can gain a better understanding of this most abnormal field.