5X5 Episode 47

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You are listening to the Skeptics Guide 5x5, five minutes with five skeptics. With Steve, Jay, Rebecca, Bob and Evan.

S: This is SGU 5x5 and tonight we are talking about remote viewing. Remote viewing is a form of extra-sensory perception or ESP, that involves as the name implies - imagining or seeing in your mind, an image that is remote from your current location. So you are not seeing it with your eyes, you’re seeing it with your mind. The term itself was introduced, by two parapsychologists, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974, who did some of the first research on remote viewing.

B: Also to be a little bit more specific, if a sender or beacon is used to send psychic images, then it's said to be telepathy. If no beacon is used, then, the term clairvoyance is more generally used.

E: Except how does that work when, there are claims of being able to see things such as mountains on far away planets, and other unverifiable facts by any other, by any other means.

S: Well the entire phenomenon of remote viewing has not been verified. So if we talk about it from the point of view of plausibility - how could it possibly work? Well certainly it lies far, far, far outside the realm of physics and neuroscience etc. There is no, process or property of the brain that could account for it, there is no energy or phenomenon in physics that can account for this phenomenon either. So that gives it an extremely implausible position to be starting from.

E: There is trickery and fakery though. Witch many people over the course of (*laughs*) history conducting these tests both subjects and researchers, have been found on many occasions to be cheating.

S: Yeah, certainly magicians can produce the effect of seeming to do remote viewing, and in fact some of Targ and Puthoff's original research was criticized as them just being fooled, by trickery.

?: Would dousing be considered a form of remote viewing?

S: No. Dousing is a form of ESP, but that's more divination. Divination is getting information, by using some kind of a yes/no-system. Whereas remote viewing is getting an image or picture.

B: The US government actually popularized remote viewing with the Stargate project, which where active in the 1970s all the way up through 1995. And the psychic research was done at Stanford University and the American Society for Psychical Research.

S: So what was that? About 20 years or so of research, and about 20 million dollars - the government concluded that remote viewing was worthless. That they, you could not use it in order to spy, you know remotely, on your enemies. Could not use it to transfer information in any, you know any, useful information - even three letters or anything. So essentially, abandoned as worthless after about 20 million of tax-payers money was spent. Has also been a lot of, civilian research in the area - ah, and even some overlap of course. The most famous research into remote viewing was the so called Ganzfeld experiments. Ah. That was a - ahm, Ganzfeld is a procedure where you have somebody in a somewhat of a sensory deprivation situation and they have to choose among four images that the sender is sending to them. And proponents or believers, like Dean Rayden for example, claimed that they have been able to obtain, greater than chance results, with the Ganzfeld set-up, however - ah, ahm, careful review of data and the procedures that are being used in the specific labs, as the controls are tightened satisfactorily the, the effect size disappears, it shrinks until it disappears entirely. And once you get to, a lab doing really, very, very tight protocols - where there is no leaking for example of information, and the randomization process is proper etc. Following the so called Hyman and Honorton criteria for a tight study - then the effects really are just within chance. And there's - they haven't been able to replicate the Ganzfeld experiment to produce an actual effect. And, no - you know, no researchers have been able to produce a consistent, replicable effect, so - remote viewing is left as being highly implausible and - not validated by any specific research protocol, that can consistently or in any replicated fashion, produce positive results. So, I think Occam's Razor, dictates in this case, that the phenomenon of remote viewing simply does not exist.

B: Like much of the paranormal, not only is the experimental evidence lacking, the plausibility factor by itself is a complete deal breaker for me. There is no evidence that the brain is a receiver of information, in the way that remote viewing would've require. The energy that could carry such information has never been detected and would be detectable. If a brain could detect it, then so could our instrumentation.

S: And if you even just, ask questions like what happens with this, if, if, there is an alleged signal that cannot be detected by equipment. Can it be blocked by, shielding? Can it be - will it diminish with distance? And any way you try to test it, to try to see what characteristics it has, it turns out not to have any characteristics. It doesn't, it can't be blocked by anything, it does not diminish with distance. Again, Occam's Razor - dictates that that's consistent with there being no effect there. There is no signal.

• outro

S: SGU 5x5 is a companion podcast to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe - a weekly science podcast brought to you by the New England Skeptical Society, in association with Skepchick.org. For more information on this and other episodes, visit our website: www.theskepticsguide.org. Music is provided by Jake Wilson.