Loyd and Gretchen define where the line is drawn between proof and evidence in the scientific community.
Loyd Auerbach is a leading expert on parapsychology and is on the Board of Directors of the Rhine Research Center. He earned his B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Northwestern University and his M.S. in Parapsychology from John F. Kennedy University.
Loyd has authored multiple books on parapsychology, appeared on several television shows and documentaries regarding the paranormal, and teaches parapsychology at several universities across the country. His knowledge and experience of magic and mentalism, coupled with his background in Parapsychology and broad knowledge of other sciences has led a number of researchers to consult with him, especially with regard to laboratory controls and where the potential for psychic fraud has existed.
Gretchen O'Neal is a spiritual accountability and empowerment coach. She owns and operates www.cometoyourself.com. Come To Yourself provides unbiased, easily accessible information from the top scholars in the fields of transpersonal psychology and consciousness studies, coupled with personal insights from successful artists, musicians, and business professionals, to anyone looking to start their spiritual journey to discover and serve their soul's mission in life
Gretchen:
Hi, this is Gretchen from come to yourself.com with our series facts, not fiction, featuring a discussion about Paris psychology with Lloyd Auerbach. Enjoy you'd said, um, something that I think is really important that I want to highlight, which is even scientists don't necessarily have proof. They have acceptance. And that obviously implies that they may run a quote unquote experiment a couple of times, and they all agree that what occurred was proof enough that the concept or the original hypothesis is accurate, right. And they put that out. And then all of a sudden that is kind of accepted by the rest of the world as proof that that exists. Right? So would it then hold corollary that if the same acceptance existed in the field of parapsychology, when there are events that are proven, you know, through tests that are run, then maybe there would be proof that Saya bilities exists or USP exists enough for the public to accept.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. I think one problem we run into, and this has been very clear, uh, it's been made was made clear, extremely clear. Um, about 10 years ago, uh, most scientists are unwilling to look at the evidence or even our research results. Uh, there's still this general idea that we have no repeatable experiments. We actually do. We have quite a number of repeatable experiments and the data is clean and people who have people who have dared to look at our experiments often in order to see how badly we were doing them laws found that there were no flaws and were kind of surprised. And grudgingly had to say, well, there's something here. I don't know if it's ESB, but there's something here. Um, 10 years ago, Daryl BEM, who's a social psychologist. Well-respected at Cornell university who was also involved in Paris. Psychology did a two year study, wrote a paper on it on pre cognition, uh, which was called feeling the future because it's based on biometrics that were attached to college students who were about to see pictures that could be evocative or neutral and found that their bodies reacted a few seconds before the evocative pictures were randomly shown to them. So, um, he wrote this paper, it was going to be published in a mainstream psychology journal. The journals often will preview with table of contents. What they're going to publish in the next issue and in the fall, I think it might have been the fall of 20, 2010. Um, the journal, the journal came out and on the, on the actual table of contents that had feeling the future of studying pre-cognition buyback, Daryl BEM, the human cry in made for mainstream science made major news, actually, uh, scientists were being interviewed. Um, it, some of the interviews, some of the journalists were smart. Some of them said, have you read the paper? It wasn't even out yet. Right. And they said, no. Um, and, and then the follow-up question was, will you be reading the paper? And they said, no. And that was, uh, that was without them knowing whether Daryl had actually come up with significant results or chance results. I mean, that paper could have said we did this two year study with 2000 students and we came up with chance results, pre cognition doesn't exist. Yeah. That could have been the paper, the conclusion, but they refuse to look at it. And some of them even said, why would I, it's not possible. So basically what that boils down to is, and these are, by the way, these are some very well-known scientists that were asked this question. Um, if you don't look at the evidence, if you don't look at the research and you have a biased opinion or belief that it doesn't work, of course, you're going to continue to say that. Yeah. But once you look at that and my colleague and may was able to get some people in various fields of science by berating them until they did. He got them to look at the research in certain areas. And they were surprised at how well conceived and well controlled our experiments were at the results that we had. Um, they didn't, again, didn't know what to make of them, but they at least did that with them study when it came out and people were looking at it, of course the skeptics attack attack. It looked at it, they went through his controls. They could not find a single flaw in his design, his execution or the statistics. And he was using a form of statistics called Bayesians statistics. So what happened next? There's a problem with Basie and statistics he's using them properly, but clearly is a problem with our statistics. Now that caused a real fear in psychology because a huge number of psychology experiments[inaudible] study was flawed because of that. And so we're there's
Gretchen:
So, so then let me ask if a person wanted to see for themselves, like you said, if somebody wanted to actually see that these studies have occurred and maybe read them themselves, are they accessible to people?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. A lot of them are, um, there is, uh, Dean Raden, who's a well-known author in our field and also writes, I think for the general public writes really well for the general public. Uh, Dean's got a page, um, a research page on his website, Dean raden.com and it lists accessible papers in various areas. You know, many of them are academics, so that, that may be a different situation, but they are available. And there's a huge amount of pair of psychology papers available. Uh, if someone were just, there's a search engine called free, full PDF, free, full pdf.com, and you can just pop in Paris like ecology and you'll get all sorts of papers that are on author sites. And some of them are peer reviewed and some of them are not yet. Um, so you have to be a little careful with that, but there's a lot of material that people can actually get to.
Gretchen:
And more importantly, it shows that there's actual scientific research studies done on these concepts. And it's not just people promoting them or talking about them or alluding to them, or even, you know, proselytizing that exists, actual scientific study research done on all of that.
Speaker 2:
My colleagues are not publishing and haunted magazine or psychic magazine or something like that. Right. Exactly. I might be, but they're.