More and more scientists are striving to develop methods for studying phenomena that are difficult to investigate with traditional scientific methods.
Below are a few examples where scientists have tried to investigate the paranormal or human consciousness.
1. Dr. Gary Schwartz
Gary Schwartz received his doctorate from Harvard University, taught psychiatry and psychology at Yale University, and is currently a professor at the University of Arizona. He conducted research among people who claimed to be able to predict the future.
“If you are experimenting with people who say they have psychic abilities, then it is very important to build the experience strictly around their perceived abilities,” writes Dr. Schwartz on his website. "If the experiment is not built in this way, it will turn out that you will start demanding from people what they really cannot do."
Schwartz develops individual tests for each subject and does not use a standardized approach. Not all people who can predict the future do it the same way. According to him, he found people who really have such abilities.
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2. Dr. Bernard Bateman
Dr. Bernard Bateman, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, proposed the creation of an interdisciplinary branch called the science of coincidence.
In a 2011 report, he writes: “One of the biggest challenges in developing a new discipline is creating a platform for scientific research that takes into account subjectivity and human consciousness. Coincidence depends on the mind of the observer. The most important question is how to develop methods and technical language that would take into account the subjective factor. The answer to this question remains to be found."
3. Dr. Alan Sanderson
Dr. Alan Sanderson is a psychiatrist and hypnosis specialist. He is also the founder of the Spirit Release Foundation, founded in 1999, which specializes in the clinical treatment of spirit possession.
In 2003, Dr. Sanderson wrote in his talk: “I want to emphasize that my concept of ghost possession and the method for driving them out is not related to religious or spiritual faith. It is based on clinical observation and response to standard therapy. We use a scientific approach, although it takes into account subjective experience and goes beyond modern scientific theory."
He noted that this area of research faces obstacles that he hopes to overcome. This is a fairly new industry, surrounded by a halo of "superstition, bias and erroneous information." Funding is a big problem.
How to test psychic abilities?
In the book Difficulties of Probability, Alistair Hardy and Robert Harvey studied the psychic perception test, widely used in the scientific literature. Experience has not yielded evidence to support the existence of such abilities. Rather, it has shown that the testing system is not suitable.
The subjects had to read the thoughts of other people and draw what they saw. Some of the drawings did coincide, and the scientists wanted to state that this was really possible thanks to telepathy. But in the end, they stopped the experiment, because the performance in the control group with randomly recruited people was higher than in the test group, which included people supposedly with supernormal abilities.
But what if not all the people in the test group who claimed to have psychic abilities actually did? What if only some of them had the ability? There is a possibility that many people have extrasensory perception. It is possible that the randomly recruited people from the second group possessed extrasensory perception to a certain extent and could sense what other people were thinking, but they simply never paid attention to it.
Future experiments
A smartphone application was created to study collective consciousness and the phenomenon of coincidences. Users write about their experiences in real time, and a rich database helps investigators.
Stanford University physicist William A. Tiller has developed a technique that he says physically captures human intentions. He discovered a vast area in the space between particles containing energy that cannot be measured with conventional instruments. Tiller found that human consciousness or intention can activate this mysterious energy, as a result, it begins to interact with particles that can be fixed using devices. As a result, he began to study the physics of human intention and this energy.
In the era of mass communication, ordinary enthusiasts can sometimes provide ground for research. Here's an example of an Internet user who set up an experiment that tested his friend's paranormal abilities and shared it on Reddit:
“My friend claimed that he can leave his body while sleeping and travel in spirit form. For obvious reasons, I was skeptical about such a statement, but I did not completely reject the idea, because I know it well. He's not the kind of person who would say such things as a joke or to play pranks on me.
After the evening spent at my house, I told him: “Listen, come on, you will show me that you really can do it. Come to my room as a spirit tonight. I got the idea to write a message on a piece of paper, and he had to guess what I wrote there. He agreed. The next morning, he called me and told me that he had read the note … He correctly recounted its contents.
This experience shocked me. I know most people find it hard to believe something like this, but it actually happened. And I am 100% sure that he could not spy on what I wrote there in some usual way."