AN, I noticed that Daryl Berm is also a magician. To me, that's a potential red flag right there. No... not conclusive, of course. But, it certainly provides a warning that an "illusion" might be at work. After all, magician's are masters at Human psychological response, as seen to such effect by such seemingly "psychic" magicians as David Blaine.
Now, let's examine Mr. Berm's experiments closely to see if anything smacks of a magician's trick:
Experiment #1 -
Students were shown a list of words to memorise. They were later asked to recall as many as they could and finally they were given a random selection of the words to type out.
Not surprisingly, they were better at remembering some words than others. But spookily, these tended to be the words they would later be asked to type, suggesting a future event had affected their ability to remember.
As a logical person, my immediate concern is that it appears the words were preselected by Berm and not randomly generated for this test.
Just as David Blaine is able to "predict" the answers given him by the passers-by participants of his fabulous street magic by carefully preselecting the questions and conditions of same he asks, so also could Berm use these same magician's tricks in pre-preparing the questions and conditions of this "psychic" experiments so as to help guide his own participants to do the same.
And, sure enough, while the reporter describes the results as "spooky," yet what he describes is hardly that, at all: the same words that students found easier to remember were the exact same words they later were asked to "predict."
This, again, is exactly what David Blaine does constantly when he will ask a participant to choose an odd number between 1 and 9... to which the greatest likelihood is that the participant will choose 3... and then, when the participant does choose this number, he produces some pre-prepared sealed envelope or other such item whereon the number "3" appears! Not so "spooky," now is it? All that Blaine did was use his study of Human nature to give him a great advantage over simple statistics to greatly influence and improve the odds of what participants' responses will be.
Experiment #2 -
As the article describes:
In another experiment, the students were shown an image of two curtains on a computer screen and told one concealed an erotic picture. The students chose the curtain hiding the naughty picture slightly more often than could be explained away by chance, this week's New Scientist reports.
Importantly, the position of the picture was randomly allotted by a computer which didn't make its decision until after the volunteer chose one curtain or the other.
Wow... this one is so unremarkably obvious that I hardly no which end of this to begin. First off, the results are almost 50/50... which is, again, fully within the laws of probability. After all, while flipping a coin will expectedly also be 50/50, yet if one flips heads slightly more often than tails, this does not indicate telekinetic or psychic ability to influence the result!
However what I found somewhat strange if not downright suspicious was Mr. Berm's decision to have the computer make its own decision of where to place the naughty picture only AFTER the student had made his/her selection (?!). While they say this post-decision selection was made randomly by the computer, yet there would seem to be no reason for doing this except to perhaps find a means of using the student's decision to influence where the computer placed the image!
And finally, while the reporter correctly noted that... "the proof of the pudding... will be in whether other scientists can repeat the professor's success", yet despite at least one university's attempt to reproduce such results (as found here), no such replication has yet been accomplished.
Seems to me that what we are witnessing is simply a more elaborate David-Blaine-esque magic trick performed in a laboratory instead of on the street. The major difference, yet again, is that while David Blaine, like all magicians, openly admits his illusions to be nothing more than well-performed tricks, would-be psychic apologists like Berm try to deliberately deceive and defraud.
- Upir'
