Science no longer treats nature, particularly life, as a supernatural design. Today, the very mention conjures up images of young-Earth creationists with their bizarre scriptural literalism. Even the interesting questions creationists raise (Edis 1998a) are overshadowed by the weirdness produced by leaders such as Henry M. Morris, who can-with a straight face-go on about Satan using psychic powers to deceive Eve (1993).

There are, of course, more liberal views. Theologians interpret evolution as a progressive spiritual development, the creative influence of an infinite God pouring out onto a finite world (Haught 1999). Others speculate about whether the accidents of evolution were supernaturally tweaked to ensure we turn up (Peacocke 1986), or if evolution was set in motion by a creative purpose (Wright 2000). Meanwhile, biologists work with blind mechanisms, and any “progress” in evolution is an artifact of the fact that life started out simple (Nitecki 1988). Liberal notions of design are relatively harmless, mainly because they are only loosely connected to modern biology.

Lately, an “Intelligent Design” (ID) movement has been emerging, trying to steer a course between the inconsequential handwaving of the liberals and the lunatic literalism of the creationists. It too promises more than it has delivered. Phillip Johnson, perhaps their most prominent spokesman, forcefully condemns evolutionary naturalism (1991, 1995) but presents no serious alternative. Michael Behe (1996) claims instances of “irreducible complexity” in biology, which adds up to little more than an old-fashioned incredulity about achieving complex interdependent structures incrementally. The effect of ID on mainstream science has been negligible.

Even so, ID has scored a few philosophical points. Defenders of evolution often hope a tame science and a defanged religion can peacefully occupy separate spheres. Science, we declare, is “methodologically naturalistic,” considering only naturalistic explanations while saying nothing about any deeper supernatural reality (Pennock 1996). But intelligent design is a straightforward fact claim, one which is true about those objects we make ourselves. That an intelligent agent designed some aspects of nature is also a legitimate hypothesis. If science can say nothing about the probable truth or falsity of such a claim, there must be something wrong with our understanding of science. So ID advocates correctly argue that science cannot be restricted to a predefined set of naturalistic possibilities (Moreland 1994). A theoretically sophisticated, empirically well-anchored ID hypothesis can be a serious scientific proposal.

But then the problem is finding such a proposal. Ineffectual complaints about evolution in the Johnson and Behe style are not enough, so skeptics easily dismiss ID as thinly disguised creationism.

Intelligent Design and William Dembski

Enter William Dembski. Already known as one of the better ID proponents, he has recently gathered his arguments in a book that claims to put ID on a solid footing (Dembski 1999). Surprisingly, he is often correct. Though dead wrong in his overall conclusions, he makes interesting mistakes, and his errors highlight how powerful an idea Darwinian evolution is, in biology and beyond.

Dembski sets out to fashion a workable notion of supernatural intervention. One difficulty is that a miracle sounds like an all-purpose excuse rather than a genuine explanation. And even if we allow a design hypothesis in analogy to human creativity, this is easily abandoned at the first hint of a naturalistic alternative. Dembski therefore proposes to detect intelligent action in a way that avoids becoming an excuse or a weak analogy. We distinguish design from accident, he says, by seeing if our data exhibit contingency, complexity, and specification.

Contingency means an information-conveying system must allow many possible arrangements. Not all order is evidence of purpose. Objects we drop fall rather than drift off in random directions, but this only manifests a simple physical law. In contrast, it is as easy to type “urqgkwffferj . . .” as to type a real argument; an isolated string of nonsense-DNA is no different in chemical stability from one that codes for a useful protein.

To rule out pure chance taking over in the absence of simple constraints, Dembski demands complexity. A world of physical laws and random events will occasionally produce something that makes sense, like a monkey at a typewriter banging out “hello world.” But the longer and more complex the message, the more unlikely this is.

Specification is crucial for telling what sort of data is meaningful. Finding (pi) encoded in a radio signal from space would suggest an intelligent source, while any particular random string, though just as improbable, is merely noise. We must be able to specify meaningful patterns before the fact; otherwise, given thousands of crank-hours at work, we can find messages in anything, such as a plan of history in the Great Pyramid.

Dembski argues that such criteria can be made rigorous (1998). Inferring design-or distinguishing messages from noise-is an important problem, from everyday interpretation of ambiguous data in a social context to SETI research. For example, astronomers first wondered if periodic signals from pulsars indicated alien life, but the signals were too simple and soon a physical explanation was found. Dembski formalizes requirements like complexity, defining a procedure to detect design.

Dembski’s information-theoretic work is fairly respectable.⁽¹⁾ The controversy begins when he applies his criteria to biology, finding that life exhibits just the sort of specified complexity that is supposed to signify intelligent design. ID proponents claim to improve on the classical design argument by providing a rigorous procedure to identify a particular sort of order indicating intelligent origin. When tested on objects we know the origins of, they say, this procedure reliably sorts out artifacts from the haphazardly cobbled together, even when we know little about the functions of the artifacts. So it looks like organisms are also, at some level, products of design.

ID needs more, since its criteria might fail to distinguish between explicit design and evolution-both may generate specified complexity (Elsberry 1999). ID proponents attack this in two ways. One is to produce the usual litany of alleged failures of Darwinian “macroevolution": the origins of life, the Cambrian explosion, Behe’s “irreducibly complex molecular machines,” and so forth. This is the tedious, disreputable side of ID. The second way, however, extends the information-theoretic argument, promising to show why a Darwinian mechanism cannot create specified information.

Darwinism must fail, Dembski says, because information is conserved. Unintelligent processes that transform and transmit information can never add new content. Consider a message string, “3:45 p.m.” This might be translated into “15:45"; no information is gained or lost thereby. Or it might be degraded by a process that rounds times to the nearest hour, leaving “4:00 p.m.” If the message was input to a computer program that e-mailed meeting times to a department staff, it might be converted to “Next department meeting: 3:45 p.m.,” but the additional comment, though useful, is not really new. Such a program could only be used to transmit meeting times; this information is built into its initial design.

Random processes do no better. A noisy channel might, with a lot of luck, produce “Christmas party: 3:45 p.m.,” but there is no reason to trust it. Variation-and-selection can add no meaningful novelty to a message because all it does is reveal information in pre-programmed selection criteria. According to ID, the creativity producing information-rich structures like living beings cannot be captured by blind naturalistic processes.

Physics and Intelligent Design

To see what is wrong here, we can cast ID as a physical claim. First, take a universe with dynamical laws like those of Newtonian physics. These conserve information at a microscopic level; a complete description of particle positions and velocities at any time also determines all past and future states. Following Dembski, we might suspect that if complex structures appear at some point, this is not a genuine novelty, since these were implicit in previous states.

However, such a scenario does not preclude evolution. It suggests a clockwork deism, where the information provided through the initial design unfolds in time, manifesting in complex macroscopic structures. This still leaves the question of how these local pockets of specified complexity are assembled. Variation-and-selection may still do the job.

This issue is related to one of the classic problems of physics: understanding an irreversible macroscopic world, which does not appear to conserve information, when our basic microscopic dynamics are reversible. Part of the answer comes from realizing we never have a complete description of any system. What approximate knowledge we have rapidly becomes obsolete due to dynamical chaos, as even the smallest error grows exponentially. We can only keep track of statistical properties of systems, through macroscopic variables like temperature, which behave irreversibly (Gaspard 1992). For example, if we bring objects at different temperatures into contact and let them reach equilibrium, they will end up the same temperature. No measurement can recover their original temperatures, and they will not spontaneously acquire different temperatures again.

Such loss of information does not challenge ID; it even plays into creationist suspicions that the second law of thermodynamics precludes evolution. But the same physics also underlies the emergence of order from chaos. If a system behaves such that its maximum possible entropy increases faster than its actual entropy, it will be driven away from equilibrium. This creates space for order to form. In particular, Darwinian processes can take hold: simple replicating structures can mutate and diversify, exploring more complex configurations along the way. All this takes place under ordinary physics, without outside intervention (Brooks and Wiley 1988, Edis 1998a).

The information-based arguments of ID, then, allow design to be confined to setting up initial conditions. Hence they are too broad to support a critique of evolution. In fact, the situation is worse, as the deistic view is itself highly dubious.

Focusing on microscopic information and deterministic dynamics can give the impression the physics of complexity is a nuisance foisted on us because of our imperfect knowledge. Actually, much of what we have learned about complexity is valid under a wide range of dynamical laws and initial conditions: concepts like irreversibility, self-organization, and Darwinian variation-and-selection are not very sensitive to the underlying microscopic physics. So studying complexity requires more than traditional physics, calling on fields such as biology and computer science (see Badii and Politi 1997). What exact history is realized in a universe does, of course, depend on microscopic details. But just obtaining local pockets of specified complexity is not too difficult. When a variety of dynamical laws can generate complexity from random initial conditions, it is quite a leap to conclude there must be an intelligence behind it all.

Modern physics provides even less of a peg to hang ID upon. With general relativity, random boundary conditions are no longer tucked away in the distant past; a black hole is as much a source of true randomness as the Big Bang (Hawking, in Hawking and Penrose 1996). And quantum mechanics is notorious for its pervasive dynamic randomness. Randomness also makes physical systems haphazardly explore their possible states, leading to irreversibility. And now, it makes no sense to speak of predetermined order. Random data is patternless (Chaitin 1987), so no cause behind it can be inferred; certainly not intelligent design.

Enter Artificial Intelligence

Our physical world is a realm of accidents, of seething, mindless dynamism-the unpredictable twists and turns of history. Yet expecting a combination of laws and chance, however elaborate, to be genuinely creative may be too much. ID, after all, is not just an exercise in information theory; it also draws upon deep-seated intuitions that machines cannot display creative intelligence. Without some account of the place of intelligence within nature, it is still possible to suspect naturalistic explanations of complexity overreach.

Many a science fiction tale tells how a hero defeats a computer by posing a problem it was not programmed to deal with. It then starts saying “does not compute!” in a synthetic yet anxious voice, and finally goes up in smoke. Unlike the rule-bound machine, however, we think human intelligence at its best is flexible, innovative. We confront situations beyond what we have prepared for, and if we do not always succeed, we still often come up with novel approaches to the problem.

As Dembski’s argument that information is conserved makes clear, it is difficult to see how new content can be generated mechanically. Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers ask us to imagine machines that perform a variety of complicated tasks, learning about and responding to their environment in sophisticated ways. But if these machines remain within the bounds of their programming, it is natural to attribute intelligence not to them but to their designers. ID voices this suspicion: that no pre-programmed device can be truly intelligent, that intelligence is irreducible to natural processes.

Such intuitions underlie not only ID but some respectable criticisms of AI, including those based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. This has recently been championed by Roger Penrose, the eminent physicist (1989, 1994); Gšdel’s theorem is attractive because it reveals how any rule-bound system has blind spots because it is unable to step outside of a pre-defined framework. And though Dembski considers Penrose to be insufficiently anti-naturalistic, ID requires at least some such critique of AI to be sound.

It turns out, however, that all that is needed to add the required flexibility to a machine is to let it make use of randomness. A random function, because it is patternless, can be used to break out of any pre-defined framework. It serves as a novelty-generator. Plus we can prove a “completeness theorem” showing all functions can be expressed as a combination of rules and randomness. So if all we claim is that humans are flexible in a way not captured by rules, randomness alone does the trick. There is no other option (Edis 1998b).

Now we need to use randomness for actual creativity. And we already know an excellent mechanism for putting bare novelty to work: natural selection. Dembski’s claim that randomness does not help create content is incorrect; a Darwinian process is different from altering a message through fixed selection criteria. Everything is subject to random modification-there are no predetermined criteria; nothing but mindless replication and retention of successful variants.

A fuller understanding of something as convoluted as human creativity is a long way off. But fundamental objections like those ID raises have largely been overcome. It is almost certain that randomness and Darwinian processes are vital in the workings of our brains. So our current sciences of the mind are full of ideas like neural Darwinism, Darwin machines, memes, and multiple levels of Darwinian mechanisms depending on competing processes to assemble our stream of consciousness (Dennett 1995). Variation-and-selection, today, is beginning to be vital for theories of mind as well as biology.

A Darwin Detector

What, then, are we to make of ID? It now seems like a bad argument, concocted of pointless complaints against evolution on one hand, and flawed intuitions about information and intelligence on the other. Discarding ID, however, would be hasty. Important theories about the world convince us by ruling out serious alternatives. Historically, evolution took shape against then-compelling notions of design. ID may be wrong, but it is also a decent update of Paley with a real intellectual appeal. Its errors provide a useful contrast, highlighting what is correct in evolution.

Confronting the information-based arguments of ID is especially helpful in revealing how profound an idea evolution is. As ID proponents suspect, Darwinian thinking is not confined to biology; it anchors a naturalistic understanding of all complex order, even including our own intelligence. Hence today, Darwinism is central to a thoroughly naturalistic picture of our world.

So in defending their religious views, ID proponents pick the correct target. They are also right to emphasize how designed artifacts and living things are similar. And Dembski’s criteria of contingency, complexity, and specification do reveal a special kind of order they share. The irony is, what these criteria actually detect is that there were Darwinian processes at work. The complexity of life is directly produced through evolution, but an artifact also is an indirect product of the variation-and-selection processes that must be a part of creative intelligence.

Defenders of evolution can now allow themselves a wry smile. Intelligent Design is as close to respectable as anti-evolution intuitions are likely to get, and Dembski has made a good stab at making ID rigorous. And what we end up with is a Darwin detector.

Note

1. Dembski’s work has been criticized (Fitelson et al. 1999), but these objections do not seem fatal. In any case, Dembski’s criteria are not signs of design as he understands it, even if we were to ignore all such criticism.

References

• Badii, Remo, and Antonio Politi. 1997. Complexity: Hierarchical Structures and Scaling in Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Behe, Michael J. 1996. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. New York: Free Press.
• Brooks, Daniel R., and E.O. Wiley. 1988. Evolution as Entropy: Toward a Unified Theory of Biology. (Second Edition). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Chaitin, G.J. 1987. Algorithmic Information Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dembski, William A. 1999. Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.
• —. 1998. The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Dennett, Daniel C. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Edis, Taner. 1998a. Taking creationism seriously. Skeptic 6:2 56.
• —. 1998b. How Gšdel’s theorem supports the possibility of machine intelligence. Minds and Machines 8 251.
• Elsberry, Wesley R. 1999. Review of The Design Inference by William A. Dembski, Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 19:2 32.
• Fitelson, Brandon, Christopher Stephens, Elliott Sober. 1999. How not to detect design-critical notice: William A. Dembski, the design inference. Philosophy of Science 66:3 472.
• Gaspard, Pierre. 1992. Diffusion, effusion, and chaotic scattering: An exactly solvable Liouvillian dynamics. Journal of Statistical Physics 68 673.
• Haught, John F. 1999. God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. Boulder: Westview.
• Hawking, Stephen, and Roger Penrose. 1996. The Nature of Space and Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Johnson, Phillip. 1991. Darwin on Trial. Washington: Regnery Gateway.
• —. 1995. Reason in the Balance: The Case against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.
• Moreland, J.P., ed. 1994. The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.
• Morris, Henry M. 1993. Biblical Creationism: What Each Book of the Bible Teaches about Creation and the Flood. Grand Rapids: Baker.
• Nitecki, Matthew H., ed. 1988. Evolutionary Progress. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Peacocke, Arthur R. 1986. God and the New Biology. London: Dent.
• Pennock, Robert T. 1996. Naturalism, evidence and creationism: The case of Phillip Johnson. Biology and Philosophy 11:4 543-559.
• Penrose, Roger. 1989. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• —. 1994. Shadows of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wright, Robert. 2000. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon.

Two recent articles in the Skeptical Inquirer have claimed that the feeling of being stared at is an illusion. Both have attempted to refute my own experimental research on the subject, which indicates that many people do indeed have an unexplained ability to detect stares.

A variety of surveys have shown that most people believe they can feel unseen stares (Sheldrake 1994). In his article ”Can we tell when someone is staring at us?” (March/April 2000 SI) Robert A. Baker, a CSICOP Fellow, dismissed this belief as false. “Skeptics . . . believe that it is nothing more than a superstition and/or a response to subtle signals from the environment” (Baker 2000, p. 40). He claimed to provide empirical evidence to support his presuppositions.

David Marks (also a CSICOP Fellow) and John Colwell in their article ”The Psychic Staring Effect: An Artifact of Pseudo Randomization” (September/ October 2000 SI) claimed that my own results were an artifact arising from one of the randomization procedures I have followed: “When random sequences are used people can detect staring at no better than chance rates,” they asserted. In this article I show that this claim is not true. Both papers are seriously flawed, and neither stands up to skeptical scrutiny.

Baker’s “Demonstrations”

For his first demonstration Baker selected people who were engrossed in eating or drinking, watching TV, working at computer terminals or reading in the University of Kentucky library. He unobtrusively positioned himself behind them and stared at them. He then introduced himself and asked them to fill in a response sheet.

Baker’s prediction was that people engrossed in an activity would “never” attend to a sensation of being stared at. Thirty-five out of forty people checked the expected response: “During the last 5 minutes I was totally unaware that anyone was looking at me.” But two people reported that they had been aware that they were “being observed and stared at” and three reported they felt something was “wrong.” Baker noted that while he was staring at these very subjects, “All three stood up, looked around, shifted their position several times and appeared to be momentarily distracted on a number of occasions.”

The answers of these five people went against Baker’s prediction, so he retrospectively introduced another criterion. He ruled that subjects should be able to say where he had been sitting when he was looking at them. None could. He regarded their inability to do so as a “good reason to believe that they were . . . not aware that they were being viewed” (Baker 2000, p. 40). But this begs the question. A sensitivity to being stared at does not necessarily imply an awareness of the position of the starer.

To complete his analysis, Baker “discarded” the results from the two people who said they knew they had been stared at. He regarded them as “suspect” because one claimed she was constantly being spied on, and the other claimed he had extrasensory ability. But if the sense of being stared at really exists, people with paranoid tendencies might be more sensitive than most (Sheldrake 1994), and so might people who claim to have extrasensory abilities.

In Baker’s second demonstration subjects were looked at from behind by Baker himself, together with a student, at random intervals, and asked to say when they thought they were being looked at. They were told that they would be stared at for five one-minute periods during a twenty-minute trial. In accordance with his expectations, he found that their guesses were no better than chance.

Why were these results so different from the consistently positive and statistically significant effects obtained by myself and others, even when subjects were blindfolded and separated from starers by closed windows (Sheldrake 2000)? There are several relevant differences in procedure.

In my own experimental design, in a series of 20 trials there were more or less equal numbers of control and looking trials, whereas in Baker’s there were 15 control and only 5 looking one-minute periods. This peculiar feature precluded a straightforward statistical analysis of the results. Each subject was allowed only five guesses as to when they were being looked at. If guesses were entirely random, misses would be three times more probable than hits.

In my experiments each trial lasted only about 10 seconds, but Baker used 60-second trial periods. In preliminary tests, I found that subjects gave the highest percentage of correct guesses when they were asked to guess quickly, without spending much time thinking about their response.

Baker also introduced three different sources of distraction for his subjects:

1. Beside each time on the specimen score sheet shown in Baker’s paper there was a pair of unexplained numbers, for example: 0801 1&2; 0802 2&3 (Baker, 2000, p. 38). I wrote to Baker to ask for a clarification, but his reply confused matters further. He said that the times shown on his specimen time-sheet “were not on the subject’s time-sheet at all-since they, of course, would differ from subject to subject. The 1&2 indicates the first minute, the numbers 2&3 indicates the second minute of the time-period, etc.”

   If I had been one of Baker’s subjects, I would have been at a loss to understand his instructions. If I thought I was being stared at, to start with I would have had to calculate from the clock in which minute this happened. Then I would have had to decide where to write my response. Say I felt I was being stared at in the seventh minute. Would I write my response on the line labeled 6&7 or on the line labeled 7&8?

2. The instructions published by Baker are self-contradictory. He says that the subjects were told that there would be five one-minute staring periods. Yet the specimen instruction-sheet states that subjects would be stared at “five times for two minutes each.” Baker now concedes that this was an error (Baker, personal communication, May 27, 2000). To confuse matters further, in his article the one-minute staring periods are also described as “five-minute periods” (Baker 2000, p. 38).
3. Not only did Baker instruct his subjects to guess when they were being stared at, but they were also asked to compare their guess with their responses in other periods so that they could change their previous guesses, if they wanted to. This instruction might well have helped to distract subjects still further from their immediate feelings.

Like Baker, I predict that those who follow his experimental methods (including his ambiguous instructions) are likely to replicate his negative results. But I also predict that my own positive results should be replicable by those who use similar methods to my own (Sheldrake 1998, 1999, 2000).

Marks and Colwell’s Claims

In January 2000 the British Journal of Psychology published a paper entitled “The ability to detect unseen staring: A literature review and empirical tests” by John Colwell, Sadi Schröder and David Sladen. In their principal experiment, they used methods based on my own procedures, and followed my own randomized sequences of trials. They obtained strikingly significant (p<0.001) positive results that closely resembled my own findings (Sheldrake 1998, 1999). However, they argued that their participants’ positive scores did not support the idea that people really can feel stares; instead, they were an artifact that arose from “the detection and response to structure” present in my randomized sequences. This is the paper on which Marks and Colwell based their SI article.

The Background to this Controversy

In my book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994) I described how the feeling of being stared at could be investigated empirically both simply and inexpensively. As well as carrying out many experiments of my own, I published detailed instructions on my Web site (www.sheldrake.org) and more than 20,000 trials have now been carried out, many of them in schools and colleges. These experiments have given positive, repeatable, and highly significant results, implying that there is indeed a widespread sensitivity to being stared at from behind (Sheldrake 1998, 1999, 2000).

The results showed a characteristic and highly repeatable pattern, with highly significant positive scores in the looking trials and scores close to the chance level of 50% in the not-looking trials (figure 1a).

A. Combined results from experiments carried out with adults and in schools. (Data from Sheldrake 1999, Table 5. Total number of trials: 13,900)

This pattern is consistent with an ability to detect unseen staring (Sheldrake 1998, 1999). If the sense of being stared at is real, it would be expected to work when people are indeed being stared at. In the not-looking trials the subjects were being asked to detect the absence of a feeling of being looked at, a situation with no parallel in real-life experience; and under these conditions their guesses were no better than chance. Hence an asymmetry between the two kinds of trials would be expected if there really were an ability to detect unseen staring. By contrast, if subjects were cheating or responding to subtle sensory clues, scores should be elevated symmetrically in both looking and the not-looking trials.

Experiment One

In their first experiment Colwell et al. (2000) followed my own procedures in most respects, but instead of testing a large number of subjects in just one or two sessions, as in my own experiments, they tested twelve subjects in twelve successive sessions. And instead of the participants working in pairs, taking turns as starers and subjects, one of the authors, Sadi Schröder, was the sole starer in all sessions. In the first three sessions the subjects received no feedback; in the following nine they received immediate feedback as to whether their guesses were correct or not.

In the sessions with feedback, in the looking trials 59.6 percent of the guesses were correct. By contrast, in the not-looking trials the results were exactly at chance levels, with 50 percent correct (figure 1B). The overall accuracy of the subjects’ guesses was significant at the p<0.001 level. These findings were in remarkable agreement with my own and those of other investigators. But Marks and Colwell (2000) tried to dismiss them as an artifact.

B. Data from the trials with feeback in Colwell et al.'s Experiment One. (Data from Colwell et al. 2000, Table 1. Total number of trials: 2,160)

The first point in Marks and Colwell’s argument was that the positive results were obtained when subjects were given feedback. I too have found that subjects perform better with feedback (Sheldrake 1994, 1999). We also agree that feedback can enable the participants to improve their performance with practice. Colwell et al. (2000) provided clear evidence for a learning effect, with a significant (p<0.003) linear trend of improvement in accuracy over nine sessions.

Marks and Colwell then postulated that the subjects’ success when they were given feedback was due to an implicit learning of structures hidden in my randomized sequences. They showed by means of several tests that my sequences deviated from “structureless” randomness. Ironically, this was because I adopted a recommendation by Wiseman and Smith (1994) to use counterbalanced sequences containing equal numbers of looking and not-looking trials. Like Marks and Colwell, Wiseman and Smith (1994) obtained an unexpectedly positive result in a staring experiment and then tried to explain it as an artifact of the randomization procedure, but in their case they attributed it to a lack of counterbalancing.

The crux of Marks and Colwell’s argument was that because of the deviations from “structureless” randomness in my sequences, participants given feedback could have learned implicitly to detect patterns, for example that there was a relatively high probability of an alternation after “two of a kind.” But they offered no evidence that their participants in fact learned to follow such rules. They also failed to mention a fundamental flaw in their hypothesis, perhaps hoping that readers would not spot it. Implicit learning should in principle enable participants to improve equally in looking and not-looking trials. But this is not what happened; significant improvements occurred only in the looking trials (figure 1b).

Unlike Marks and Colwell (2000), Colwell et al. (2000) explicitly acknowledged this problem, but could only suggest that participants may have “focused more on the detection of staring than non-staring episodes.” This begs the question. The subjects must have selectively detected when staring trials were happening, otherwise their scores would not have been above chance levels and shown such an improvement in successive sessions. This might have occurred because they could indeed detect when they were being stared at.

Experiment Two

Colwell et al.'s second experiment was designed to test their pattern-detection hypothesis by using “structureless” random sequences. Sure enough, this time there was no significant overall positive score, although in two of the three sessions there was a highly significant excess of correct guesses in the looking trials.

At first sight, the overall non-significant result seems to confirm their hypothesis. But Marks and Colwell (2000) omitted to mention the crucial fact that in Experiment Two there was a different starer, David Sladen. Can we take it for granted that changing the starer made no difference?

Such experimenter effects are not symmetrical. The detection of Schlitz’s stares by the participants under conditions that excluded sensory cues implies the existence of an unexplained sensitivity to stares. By contrast, the failure to detect Wiseman’s stares implies only that Wiseman was an ineffective starer. Perhaps his negative expectations consciously or unconsciously influenced the way he looked at the subjects.

In Colwell et al.'s Experiment Two, the starer, Sladen, as one of the proponents of the pattern-detection hypothesis, was presumably expecting a nonsignificant result. His negative expectations could well have influenced the way in which he stared at the participants. It would be interesting to know if Sadi Schröder, the graduate student who acted as starer in Experiment One, was more open to the possibility that people really can detect when they are being stared at.

Other Relevant Experiments

Marks and Colwell claimed that their pattern-detection hypothesis invalidated the positive results of staring experiments carried out by myself and others. If these experiments had involved pseudo-random sequences and feedback, as required by their hypothesis, their criticism might have been relevant. But this is not how the tests were done, as they would have seen for themselves if they had read my published papers on the subject.

First, in more than 5,000 of my own trials, the randomization was indeed "structureless,” and was carried out by each starer before each trial by tossing a coin (Sheldrake 1999, Tables 1 and 2). The same was true of more than 3,000 trials in German and American schools (Sheldrake 1998). Thus the highly significant positive results in these experiments cannot be “an artifact of pseudo randomization.”

Second, when I developed the counterbalanced sequences that Marks and Colwell describe as pseudo-random, I changed the experimental design so that feedback was no longer given to the subjects. Since the pattern-detection hypothesis depends on feedback, it cannot account for the fact that in more than 10,000 trials without feedback there were still highly significant positive results (Sheldrake 1999, Tables 3 and 4).

Conclusions

In spite of their prior assumption that an ability to detect unseen staring must be illusory, both Baker (2000) and Colwell et al. (2000) in their first experiments obtained unexpected positive results consistent with such an ability. They attempted to dismiss these findings with question-begging arguments. In their second experiments, which gave the non-significant results they expected, an investigator with negative expectations acted as the starer. This arrangement provided favorable conditions for experimenter effects, already known to occur in staring experiments (Wiseman and Schlitz 1997). Both Baker and Marks and Colwell also failed to mention a large body of published data that went against their conclusions. In short, their claims were misleading and ill-informed.

See also: Robert Baker’s reply

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Brian Evans for helpful comments on a draft of this article.

References

• Baker, R.A. 2000. Can we tell when someone is staring at us? Skeptical Inquirer 24(2): 34-40.
• Colwell, J, S. Schröder, and D. Sladen. 2000. The ability to detect unseen staring: A literature review and empirical tests. British Journal of Psychology 91: 71-85.
• Marks, D., and J. Colwell. 2000. The psychic staring effect: An artifact of pseudo randomization. Skeptical Inquirer September/October 24(5): 41.
• Schlitz, M., and S. LaBerge, S. 1994. Autonomic detection of remote observation: Two conceptual replications. Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association 37th Annual Convention. Parapsychological Association. 352-360.
• —. 1997. Covert observation increases skin conductance in subjects unaware of when they are being observed: A replication. Journal of Parapsychology 61: 185-195.
• Sheldrake, R. 1994. Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science. London: Fourth Estate.
• Sheldrake, R. 1998. The sense of being stared at: experiments in schools. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 62: 311-323.
• —. 1999. The “sense of being stared at” confirmed by simple experiments. Biology Forum 92: 53-76.
• —. 2000. The “sense of being stared at” does not depend on known sensory clues. Biology Forum 93: 209-224.
• Wiseman, R., and M. Schlitz.1997. Experimenter effects and the remote detection of staring. Journal of Parapsychology 61: 199-207.

I never cease to be amazed by how easily a set of beliefs, no matter how bizarre, will pass from parents to children, and on to grandchildren. I suspect that the vast majority of true believers in every major religion have parents and grandparents of the same faith. It is rare indeed when sons and daughters make a clean break with strongly held fundamental beliefs of their parents.

This was brought home to me recently when E. Patrick Curry, a retired computer engineer, now a consumer health advocate in Pittsburgh, sent me a batch of material about Elisabeth Targ, daughter of the paraphysicist Russell Targ. Readers of SI will recall how the team of Targ and his paraphysicist friend Harold Puthoff made a big splash in parapsychological circles in the 1970s. They claimed to have established beyond any doubt that almost everybody is capable of “remote viewing,” their term for what used to be called clairvoyance. In addition, they claimed they had validated Uri Geller’s psychic ability to remote-view pictures, and his ability to control the fall of dice by PK (psychokinesis). They sat on the fence about Uri’s ability to bend spoons and keys because they were never able to capture the actual bending on film. Some parapsychologists called this a “shyness effect.”

Russell inherited his psi beliefs from his father, William Targ. When I lived in Chicago I used to visit the father’s bookstore on North Clark Street, a store he opened when he was twenty-two. It had a large section devoted to books about the paranormal and the occult. After working for a time as an editor for World Publishing Company, in Cleveland, Targ moved to Putnam in Manhattan where he rose to editor-in-chief. His entertaining autobiography, Indecent Pleasures, was published in 1975. At Putnam Targ was responsible for many best-sellers, including Erich von Däniken’s notorious Chariots of the Gods. (In his autobiography Targ calls it a “quasi-scientific” work on archaeology.) Under his editorship Putnam also published a raft of books about psychic phenomena, such as Susy Smith’s Book of James in which she reports on channeled messages from the spirit of William James. Targ died in 1999, at age ninety-two. His original name was William Torgownic, taken from his parents when they came from Russia to settle in Chicago where he was born.

William Targ’s beliefs in the paranormal trickled down to his son Russell, and now they have descended on Russell’s attractive and energetic daughter Elisabeth. Her mother Joan, by the way, is the sister of chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer. Elisabeth is a practicing psychiatrist with an M.D. from Stanford University, and psychiatric training at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. Ms. Targ is firmly convinced that persons have the power to use psi energy to heal the sick over long distances even when they don't know the sick but only see their photographs and are given their names.

Elisabeth first participated in psi experiments when she was a teenager. On page ninety-six of The Mind Race (1984), a book by Russell Targ and his former psychic friend Keith Harary, Elisabeth is identified as a medical student at Stanford, and an “experienced psi-experimenter and remote viewer.” In 1970 she took part in a series of what the authors call successful experiments with a psi-teaching machine. She is said to have recently obtained degrees in biology and Russian.

The authors describe a curious experiment in which Elisabeth correctly predicted in September 1980 that Reagan would win the November election for president. Here is how the test worked.

Ms. Targ’s friend Janice Boughton selected four objects to represent the four possible outcomes of the election: Carter wins, Reagan wins, Anderson wins, or none of the above. Each object, its identity unknown to Elisabeth, was put in a small wooden box. Boughton then asked Ms. Targ, “What object will I hand to you at twelve o'clock on election night?”

Elisabeth then predicted the election’s outcome by remote-viewing the object she would be given. Her description of the object was white, hollow, conical, with a string attached to the cone’s apex. The object that correlated with Reagan’s victory was a conical shaped whistle with a string attached to one end.

Of course six weeks later Ms. Targ had to be handed the box with the whistle. Otherwise, as the book’s authors put it, the initial question would have been meaningless.

A similar test of Elisabeth’s ability to remote-view a future event involved a horse race at Bay Meadows. On the night before the race, six objects, unknown to Ms. Targ, were assigned numbers that corresponded with numbers on the six horses in the race. As before, Elisabeth was told that at the end of the race she would be given the object that correlated with the winning horse.

Ms. Targ predicted the race’s outcome by visualizing something hard and spherical that reminded her of an apple and was transparent. One of the objects was an apple juice bottle. It had been assigned the number on a horse named Shamgo. Shamgo won. Naturally, after the race Elisabeth had to be handed the apple juice bottle to make sense of the experiment.

What a skeptic would like to see would be a transcript of everything Elisabeth said when she was describing the target. Did she say much more than the remarks quoted by her father and his coauthor? If so, there may have been a selection of just those remarks that seemed to describe the target. But I'm only guessing. Also, were there similar tests that failed? One in four, and one in six, are not low probabilities.

There is more about Elisabeth in the book. In May 1982 she and her father conducted a workshop at the Esalen Institute during which successful remote vision tests were carried out with Ms. Targ participating.

Elizabeth Targ is now the acting director of the Complementary Medicine Research Institute (CMRI). It is part of the California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC), in turn part of the University of California School of Medicine. Her institute is devoted to investigating such alternative forms of healing as acupuncture, acupressure, remote healing, therapeutic touch, herbal remedies, meditation, yoga, chi gong, guided imagery, and prayer. The institute’s literature does not mention homeopathy, reflexology, iridology, urine therapy, magnet therapy, and other extreme forms of alternative healing. Apparently they are too outlandish to merit investigation.

In 1998 Ms. Targ received $15,000 from the Templeton Foundation, an organization established by billionaire John Templeton, an evangelical Presbyterian who showers cash on persons and organizations he thinks are promoting religion. His interest in Ms. Targ’s institute springs from her research supporting the healing power of prayer.

In a speech on distant healing that Ms. Targ gave at the Second Annual International Conference on Science and Consciousness, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 29-May 3, 2000, she reported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now provides funds for research on “distant mental influence on biological organisms.” Of more than 135 studies of distant healing on biological organisms, she said, about two-thirds reported significant results. One fascinating study, she added, concerned remote healing of tumors on mice. The study showed that the healers who were farthest from the mice had the greatest influence in shrinking the tumors!

Ms. Targ has received $800,000 from the Department of Defense to head a four-year study of the effects of alternative healings on patients with breast cancer. The complementary healings include yoga, guided imagery, movement and art therapy, and others. “We are getting told that we can't study this,” she said, “but the beauty of the scientific method is that we can. We can determine if it works-and if so, for whom and how.”

CRMI’s main achievement so far is a six-month double-blind study of the effects of remote healing on forty patients in the San Francisco Bay area who had advanced AIDS. Forty practicing healers were recruited for the study from healing traditions that included Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Native American shamans, and graduates of “bioenergetic” schools. They were given photographs of the AIDS victims, their first names, and their blood counts.

For an hour every day, over a ten-week period, the healers directed their psi energy to the patients by using prayer or meditation. The experiment was supported by the Institute of Noetic Studies, founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchell, a true believer in all varieties of psychic phenomena, including the powers of Uri Geller, and by New York City’s Parapsychology Foundation.

Ms. Targ and three associates reported the results of the experiment in a paper titled “A Randomized Double-Blind Study of the Effects of Distant Healing in a Population with Advanced AIDS.” It was published in the prestigious Western Journal of Medicine (December 1998). The authors claim that the twenty AIDS patients who received the healing energy (without knowing they had been selected for such treatment), showed significantly better improvement than the twenty patients in the control group who did not receive the energy. As one report summarized the progress of the group receiving the energy, they had “fewer and less severe new illnesses, fewer doctor visits, fewer hospitalizations, and improved mood.”

The NIH, through its National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), has provided funding for Ms. Targ to conduct a three-year study of distant healing on 150 HIV patients. The funding for the first year alone is $243,228, with a starting date of July 1, 2000. The NCCAM has also funded a four-year project to study the effect of distant healing on persons with a brain tumor called glioblastoma. The starting date was September 18, 2000, with a first-year grant of $202,596. Both studies, Ms. Targ said, will be double blind. It looks as though Ms. Targ, over the next few years, will be receiving more than two million dollars of government funds for her research on remote healing, the cash coming from our taxes.

Ms. Targ is the author of “Evaluating Distant Healing: A Research Review,” published in Alternative Therapies (Vol. 3, November 1997), and in the same issue, “Research in Distant Healing Intentionality Is Feasible and Deserves a Place in Our Healing Research Agenda.” The executive editor of Alternative Therapies is Dr. Larry Dossey, who started the distant healing research with his 1993 book Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine.

Although Ms. Targ is firmly persuaded that distant healing works, she confesses that no one has any notion of how a healer and healee can be connected over long distances. She closes the second paper just cited with these words: “The connection could be through the agency of God, consciousness, love, electrons, or a combination. The answers to such questions await future research.”

Russell Targ’s first book, Mind Reach, coauthored by Puthoff, is about their tests of remote viewing when they worked for SRI International (then called the Stanford Research Institute). Margaret Mead wrote the book’s introduction. Targ’s second book, Mind Race, was written, as I said earlier, with psychic Keith Harary. His third book Miracles of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness and Spiritual Healing, published in 1998 by World Library, is coauthored with Jane Katra, a psychic healer.

The first half of Miracles of Mind covers the history of remote viewing, including high praise for Upton Sinclair’s book Mental Radio about his wife’s ability to remote view his drawings. The second half of Miracles of Mind is about psychic healing. Targ believes that such healing, especially healing at a distance, is related to the “interconnectedness” of all things by a quantum field such as the nonlocal field of David Bohm’s guided wave theory of quantum mechanics.

Miracles of Mind is a strange book. Some chapters are written by Targ, others by Jane Katra. In a few chapters it is hard to tell who is writing. Almost every person engaged in parapsychological research is favorably mentioned, including such far-out paranormalists as Jule Eisenbud, Andrija Puharich, Jeffrey Mishlove, Joe McMoneagle, and many others.

Katra owes an enormous debt to theosophy. She speaks admiringly of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy’s founder, as well as England’s leading theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater. I could hardly believe it, but the book cites (page 94) Occult Chemistry, a weird 1898 book by Besant and Leadbeater which describes Leadbeater’s clairvoyant probing of the interior of atoms. He is actually credited with having first discovered by clairvoyance that hydrogen has three isotopes!

Miracles of Mind takes seriously such paranormal phenomena as out-of-body travel, near-death experiences, chakras (imaginary energy points in the human body), the Akashik Records (on which all Earthly events are recorded), the visions of Edgar Cayce, and the paranormal powers of Philippine psychic surgeons (to which Katra devotes an entire chapter). There are favorable references to The Course in Miracles, a monstrous, vapid tome said to have been dictated by Jesus. Also mentioned without criticism are the powers of Arigo, Brazil’s famous psychic surgeon who operated with his “rusty knife” on thousands of patients, following instructions whispered in his left ear by a dead German physician.

Targ credits Jane with having stimulated a seemingly miraculous remission of what had been diagnosed (by whom?) as metastic cancer. “I have been well for the five years since Jane did healing treatments with me,” Targ writes. “We will never know if I actually had metastic cancer, or if it was a misdiagnosis. What we do know for sure is that Jane’s interactions with me saved me from chemotherapy, which quite likely would have killed me. . . . Did they [his doctors] tell a well man that he had a terminal disease, or did a man with a terminal disease recover through the ministrations of a spiritual healer?” Targ has no doubt that it was Jane Katra who healed him.

The following paragraphs from one of Patrick Curry’s letters sum up well the distant healing trend in which Ms. Targ is playing so prominent a role:

The rise of Elisabeth Targ’s distant healing studies is not a mere example of defective science leaking into medicine . . . it is a leading wedge of a nascent mystical movement that has been gathering tremendous steam in recent years. The parapsychological enterprise has taken on a new life in its alliance with alternative medicine and the consciousness movement. What we have is a very productive alliance of parapsychologists, old-fashioned mystics, new-fashioned mystics, and psychedelic mystics that has gotten a major foothold in medicine.

Their presence is extraordinarily strong within NCCAM (National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine) and other alternative-oriented sections of NIH (National Institutes of Health). There is a growing presence at dozens of major medical schools, especially Harvard. . . . They have primary devotion not to the ethics of science but to their own belief that they have a mission in serving the New Consciousness. Distortion, and exaggeration of all sorts, are ignored in devotion to their belief in the new paradigm.

I had a wonderful opportunity to visit Down Under during the Third Skeptics World Convention, held in Sydney on November 10-12, 2000. I determined to extend my sojourn another two weeks, so that I could investigate several myths and mysteries. I began with the “haunted” Hyde Park Barracks and then was joined by Sydney magic historian Peter Rodgers for three days of excursions. Subsequently, the Victoria Skeptics generously flew me to Melbourne. From there, Australian Skeptics’ Chief Investigator Bob Nixon, Victoria Skeptics vice-president Richard Cadena, and I motored along the “Shipwreck Coast” to Warrnambool pursuing other mysteries. Here is an encapsulated skeptical look at some of these Australian enigmas. (I hope to discuss others later.)

Convicts’ Ghosts

Reputedly “the most haunted building in Central Sydney” (Davis 1998, 2), the Hyde Park Barracks served as secure housing for government-assisted male convicts. Opened in mid-1819, its central building held an average of 600 men who were assigned to various workplaces by day and lodged at night in twelve rooms outfitted with hammocks (figure 1). Now a museum, it has attracted reports of various phenomena attested by security guards and others who spend the night there, including schoolchildren who stay on organized sleep-overs to gain the “convict experience.”

Unlike most “haunted” places the Barracks maintains a ghost file, containing accounts of experiences recorded just after they occurred. Curator Michael Bogle graciously made these available for me to study in his office. Bogle takes a “professionally neutral” stance on the subject of hauntings, but admits he has himself had no ghostly experiences. (Neither had four staff members I interviewed there; a fifth described a few incidents she attributed to a ghost, but none occurred at the Barracks.)

Despite the neutrality, the museum’s solicitation of overnight visitors’ “thoughts and feelings” about their visit-utilizing a handout with space to record their impressions-no doubt encourages spooky thoughts. The handout says in part: “Should you have an 'eerie' meeting of some sort, or merely sense an inexplicable presence, the museum would appreciate your description-with as much detail as possible.” It continues: “The accompanying [floor] plans will help you on your journey through the building and enable you, where appropriate, to map any 'out of the ordinary' occurrences.”

Not surprisingly, then, several people did report having eerie feelings. For instance, one pre-Halloween (October 11), 1991, account stated that a security guard “hoped” a certain fellow guard “could make a connection with the ghost” which “everyone in Security knew of” and which was typically experienced as “a chilling sensation” on the third floor. Other respondents described apparent “waking dreams": sometimes apparitional experiences that occur in the twilight between wakefulness and sleep (Nickell 1995; 2000). For example, one respondent reported seeing “a man standing beside my hammock looking at me” and wearing period clothes. Her account reveals she had “tried to imagine what it must have been like for the convicts who stayed there"-thus helping set the stage for such an experience.

On occasion in the written narratives are suggestions of possible pranking-as when one of a group of forty-seven schoolchildren felt a “long hand” reach in under her sleeping bag to touch her on the hip (or was that instead merely the effect of a runaway imagination, or even another waking dream?). Once, a child’s footsteps heard by two guards were first attributed to one of the children having gotten up but-that reportedly not having been the case-was explained as a sound that “must have been made by the wind.” One experiencer heard a tapping sound that staff subsequently ascribed to a mechanized display.

Such incidents seem typical of those reported at the Hyde Park Barracks, as well as many other allegedly haunted sites. For instance, “some say” that the Old Melbourne Gaol is “the repository of many troubled spirits, the ghosts of criminals who suffered and died there” (Davis 1998, 174). Certainly it is a stark showing of nineteenth-century penal life with exhibits of grim implements of restraint and punishment together with various mementos mori. An advertising brochure promises: “Experience the haunting and eerie atmosphere of the gaol, and by listening carefully, you can almost hear the clank of the prisoners’ chains.”

However, evidence of ghostly phenomena at the site is scant, notwithstanding a questionable “ghost” photo half-heartedly brought out by a gift-shop employee when the topic of hauntings was broached. She conceded that some people did get “feelings” at the site but that she had worked there for ten years without paranormal experience of her own. She jokingly conceded that she only worked one day a week and that perhaps “the ghosts take Tuesdays off.”

Cryptids

The term “cryptid” has been coined to refer to unknown animal species or to those which, believed extinct, may only have eluded scientific rediscovery (Coleman and Clark 1999, 75). Examples of the former are the yowie (Australia’s version of Bigfoot) and the bunyip (a swamp-dwelling, hairy creature with a horselike head) (Coleman and Clark 1999, 49-50; 255-257). An example of the latter is the thylacine.

Also known as the Tasmanian tiger, the Thylacinus cynocephalus was a wolflike marsupial with prominent stripes on its back (figure 2). It became extinct on the mainland some 2,500 years ago, but continued to exist on Tasmania where it eventually succumbed to habitat destruction and bounty hunting. The last known thylacine died in a zoo in 1936 (Park 1985). Nevertheless, since then hundreds of sightings have been reported, and were even on the increase in the 1980s; however, there were scant reports of attacks on sheep or other domestic animals as would have been expected if thylacines were making a comeback (Park 1985).

Still, thylacines are “frequently reported seen in the coastal border country between Victoria and South Australia” (Gilroy 1995, 74). Indeed, as we drove along the Great Ocean Road from Melbourne to Warrnambool, Bob Nixon recalled one reported Tasmanian tiger sighting some years ago near Lorne (where we ate lunch). This was an area of virgin “bush” country (a eucalypt forest), but, alas, all we saw was beautiful scenery. (I also kept an eye out for the thylacine while looking for the yowie in the Blue Mountains-to be discussed presently-another area where the striped creature is reportedly seen [Gilroy 1995].)

Hope springs eternal, but it increasingly appears that if the thylacine is not to forever remain elusive, an idea of paleontologist Mike Archer must prevail. Archer, who is also director of the Australian Museum, has suggested resurrecting the species. Using DNA from a preserved specimen, he proposes to clone the creature, giving us a glimpse of that possibility at the skeptics conference. (For a discussion of the relevant biotechnology see Lanza et al. 2000.)

The yowie, on the other hand, has left only meager traces of its supposed existence, like those of other hairy man-beasts reported around the world. These include the Himalayan yeti, the North American sasquatch, and similar creatures alleged to inhabit remote regions of China, Russia, southeast Asia, and elsewhere.

The yowie is a fearsome, hairy creature of Aboriginal mythology. Also called Doolagahl ("great hairy man”), it is venerated as a sacred being from the time of creation which the Aborigines call the Dreamtime. An alleged sighting by a hunting party of settlers in 1795 was followed by increased reports from the mountainous regions of New South Wales in the nineteenth century. For example, in 1875 a coal miner exploring in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney reportedly stalked a hairy, apelike animal for a distance before it finally eluded him. Sightings of the yowie mounted as settlers penetrated the country’s vast interior, and yowie hunter Rex Gilroy (1995, 197) now notes that his files “bulge with stories from every state.”

The self-described “'father' of yowie research,” Gilroy (1995, 202) boasts the acquisition of some 5,000 reports together with a collection of footprint casts, but he complains of “a lifetime of ridicule from both ignorant laymen and scientists alike.” When Peter Rodgers and I ventured into the Blue Mountains, we experienced something of the prevalent local skepticism at the information center at Echo Point (in the township of Katoomba). Staffers there were emphatic that the yowie was a mythical creature pursued by a few fringe enthusiasts. (To them yowies exist only as popular toys and chocolate figures marketed by Cadbury.)

Nevertheless, to Gilroy “the Blue Mountains continues to be a hotbed of yowie man-beast activities-a vast region of hundreds of square miles still containing inaccessible forest regions seldom if ever visited by Europeans.” The fabled creatures are known there, he says, as the “Hairy Giants of Katoomba” and also as the “Killer Man-Apes of the Blue Mountains” (Gilroy 1995, 212).

In the Katoomba bushland, Peter and I took the celebrated “steepest incline railway in the world” (built as a coal mine transport in 1878) down into Jamison Valley. The miserable weather gave added emphasis to the term rainforest through which we “bushwalked” (hiked) west along a trail. We passed some abandoned coal mines that Peter humorously dubbed “yowie caves,” before eventually retracing our route. We saw no “Hairy Giants of Katoomba” but, to be fair, we encountered little wildlife. The ringing notes of the bellbird did herald our visit and announce that we were not alone.

Resuming our drive we next stopped at Meadlow Bath, an historic resort area overlooking the Megalong Valley-also reputed yowie country (Gilroy 1995, 217-218). From there we surveyed the countryside which was, however, largely shrouded in fog. We continued on to Hartley, then took a narrow, winding road some 44 kilometers to Jenolan Caves. Gilroy (1995, 219) states that the Aborigines believed the caves were anciently used as yowie lairs, and he cites reported sightings and discoveries of footprints in the region.

We passed through the Grand Arch, a majestic limestone-cavern entranceway into a hidden valley, and surveyed the spectacular grotto called Devil’s Coachhouse, continuing our cryptozoological pursuit. We searched the surrounding mountainous terrain (see figure 3) for signs of the elusive yowie, again without success. Here and there the raucous laughter of the kookaburra seemed to mock our attempt. An employee told us he had worked at the site for three years without seeing either a yowie or the inn’s resident “ghost,” indicating he believed in neither.

Failing to encounter our quarry, we ended our hunt relatively unscathed-soaked, to be sure, and I with a slightly wrenched knee. But consider what might have been: headlines screaming, “Skeptics mauled by legendary beast!"-a tragic way to succeed, certainly, and with no guarantee, even if we survived, that we would be believed! Even Gilroy conceded (1995, 202) that “nothing short of actual physical proof-such as fossil or recent skeletal remains or a living specimen-will ever convince the scientific community of the existence of the 'hairy man.'”

But that is as it should be: In many instances the touted evidence for Bigfoot-type creatures-mostly alleged sightings and occasional footprints-has been shown to be the product of error or outright deception (Nickell 1995, 222-231). Cryptozoologists risk being thought naïve when they too quickly accept the evidence of “manimal” footprints. “Some of these tracks,” insists Gilroy (1995, 224), “have been found in virtually inaccessible forest regions by sheer chance and, in my view, must therefore be accepted as authentic yowie footprints.” It seems not to have occurred to the credulous monsterologist that a given “discoverer” might actually be the very hoaxer. But the debate continues.

Spiritualist’s Grave

Among the sites that supposedly make Australia “a very haunted continent” is the Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney ("International” 2000). One of the graves there has a profound link to spiritualism and once attracted famed magician Harry Houdini. It is the burial place of one of the notorious Davenport Brothers and the subject of an interesting story.

Ira and William Davenport toured the world giving demonstrations of alleged spirit phenomena. While the pair were securely tied in a special “spirit cabinet,” the “spirits” played musical instruments and performed other “manifestations” in darkened theaters. Then on July 1, 1877, while they were on tour in Australia, the long-ailing younger brother William died and was buried at Rookwood.

Decades later, in 1910, while Houdini was himself on tour there (and incidentally entered Australian history by becoming the country’s first successful aviator), the great magician/escape artist paid a visit to the grave, accompanied by two fellow magicians (Christopher 1976). Houdini (1924) found the grave “sadly neglected” and so, he wrote, “I had it put in order, fresh flowers planted on it and the stone work repaired.” Subsequently, when Houdini met the surviving brother, Ira was so moved by Houdini’s act of kindness that he confessed the brothers’ tricks, even teaching his fellow escapologist “the famous Davenport rope-tie, the secret of which,” Houdini noted, “had been so well kept that not even his sons knew it.”

My own interest in the Davenport Brothers was renewed when I was able to help bring to light the contents of their personal scrapbook (Nickell 1999). I had continued my interest in the duo by locating and visiting Ira’s grave in Mayville, New York. Now, finding myself in Sydney, I determined to recreate Houdini’s visit to William’s grave. I was accompanied again by Peter Rodgers and by another magician, Kent Blackmore (both of whom had visited the site in 1983).

The Rookwood Cemetery is huge, requiring some time for us to relocate the grave (in the Church of England Necropolis, section E, grave number 848). Armed with weed clippers and a bouquet of fresh flowers, we soon had made the site presentable once again. Like the trio who preceded us in 1910, we three magi posed for photographs to record the event (figure 4). Alas, neither William Davenport’s nor any other spirit put in an appearance-as far as we could tell. But it was nevertheless an occasion to recall those who lived in earlier times and to reflect on how things have since changed yet remained much the same. For instance, while the physical manifestations of spiritualism’s earlier era have largely been supplanted by mental mediumship (as practiced by spiritualists like John Edward and James Van Praagh), the attraction to alleged spirit communication continues.

So does the interest in other paranormal claims. Although I pursued several mysteries that had a decidedly Australian flavor, they nevertheless represented many of the same themes-hauntings, monsters, etc.-that are found virtually everywhere. How familiar is the strange, we might say, and even, considering Australia’s distinctive natural offerings, how strange the familiar.

Acknowledgments

I am supremely grateful to John and Mary Frantz for their generous establishment of an investigative fund that helps make much of my research possible. Also, in addition to those mentioned in the text, I am grateful to my Australian friends Barry Williams and Ian Bryce for their assistance. Closer to home I also owe thanks to Michael Dennett, Christian Ambrose, Tim Binga, Tom Flynn, Ranjit Sandhu, Ben Radford, Lisa Hutter, Barry Karr, Kevin Christopher, and-of course-Paul Kurtz.

References

• Chambers, John H. 1999. A Traveler’s History of Australia. Gloucestershire, U.K.: The Windrush Press.
• Christopher, Milbourne. 1976. Houdini: A Pictorial Biography. Reprinted New York: Gramercy Books, 1998, 60-83.
• Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. 1999. Cryptozoology A to Z. New York: Fireside (Simon & Schuster).
• Davis, Richard. 1998. The Ghost Guide to Australia. Sydney, Australia: Bantam Books.
• Gilroy, Rex. 1995. Mysterious Australia. Mapleton, Queensland, Australia: Nexus Publishing, 67-76, 194-227.
• Gregory’s Blue Mountains in Your Pocket. 1999. (Map 238, first edition.) Macquarie Centre, N.S.W.: Gregory’s Publishing Co.
• Houdini, Harry. 1924. A Magician Among the Spirits. Reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1972, 17-37.
• International Haunted Places. 2000. http://www.haunted-places.com/International.htm (August 4).
• Lanza, Robert P., et al. 2000. Cloning Noah’s Ark. Scientific American, November, 84-89.
• Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• —. 1999. The Davenport Brothers. Skeptical Inquirer 23.4 (July/August): 14-17.
• —. 2000. Haunted inns: Tales of spectral guests. Skeptical Inquirer 24.5 (September/October): 17-21.
• Park, Andy. 1985. Is this toothy relic still on the prowl in Tasmania’s wilds? Smithsonian, August, 117-130.

Consciousness is a hot topic. Relegated to the fringes of science for most of the twentieth century, the question of consciousness crept back to legitimacy only with the collapse of behaviorism in the 1960s and 1970s, and only recently became an acceptable term for psychologists to use. Now many neuroscientists talk enthusiastically about the nature of consciousness, there are societies and regular conferences on the topic, and some say that consciousness is the greatest challenge for twenty-first century science. Although confusion abounds, there is at least some agreement that at the heart of the problem lies the question of subjectivity — or what it’s like for me. As philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974) put it when he asked his famous question “What is it like to be a bat?” — if there is something it is like for the bat then we can say that the bat is conscious. This is what we mean by consciousness — consciousness is private and subjective and this is why it is so difficult to understand.

Meanwhile parapsychologists not only claim to have found evidence for psi (paranormal phenomena), but seem to assume that paranormal phenomena have obvious and important implications for consciousness. For example, Dean Radin’s (1997) comprehensive popular review of parapsychology is called ”The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena” and there are numerous papers on extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK) that use such phrases as “consciousness interactions” (Braud and Schlitz 1991) or “the anomalous effect of conscious intention” (Pallikari-Viras 1997) or “consciousness related anomalies” (Radin and Nelson 1989). But why are these two contentious topics so often thrown together? Are ESP and PK really the effect of consciousness? Would paranormal phenomena, if they exist, force us to a new understanding of the nature of consciousness? If so they would be most important. I therefore wish to explore this assumed relationship between consciousness and psi.

I would love to be able to provide a fair and unbiased assessment of the evidence for psi and decide whether it exists or not. But this is simply impossible. Many people have tried and failed. In some of the best debates in parapsychology the proponents and critics have ended up simply agreeing to differ (e.g., Hyman and Honorton 1986; Hyman 1995; Utts 1995) or failing to reach any agreement (Milton and Wiseman 1999). The only truly scientific position seems to be to remain on the fence, and yet to do so makes progress difficult, if not impossible.

For this reason, if for no other, you have to jump to one side or other of the fence — and preferably be prepared to jump back again if future evidence proves you wrong. I have jumped onto the side of concluding that psi does not exist. My reasons derive from nearly thirty years of working in, and observing, the field of parapsychology (Blackmore 1996). During that time various experimental paradigms have been claimed as providing a repeatable demonstration of psi and several have been shown to be false. For example, in the 1950s the London University mathematician Samuel Soal claimed convincing evidence of telepathy with his special subject Basil Shackleton, with odds estimated at 1035 against the effect being due to chance (Soal and Bateman 1954). These results convinced a whole generation of researchers and it took more than thirty years to show that Soal had, in fact, cheated (Markwick 1978). Promising animal precognition experiments were blighted by the discovery of fraud (Rhine 1974) and the early remote viewing experiments were found to be susceptible to subtle cues which could have produced the positive results (Marks and Kammann 1980). As Hyman (1995, 349) puts it, “Historically, each new paradigm in parapsychology has appeared to its designers and contemporary critics as relatively flawless. Only subsequently did previously unrecognized drawbacks come to light.”

The Ganzfeld Experiments

The most successful paradigm during that time, and the one I shall concentrate on, has undoubtedly been the ganzfeld. Subjects in a ganzfeld experiment lie comfortably, listening to white noise or seashore sounds through headphones, and wear halved ping-pong balls over their eyes, seeing nothing but a uniform white or pink field (the ganzfeld). By reducing patterned sensory input, this procedure is thought to induce a psi-conducive state of consciousness. A sender in a distant room, meanwhile, views a picture or video clip. After half an hour or so the subject is shown four such pictures or videos and is asked to choose which was the target. It is claimed that they can do this far better than would be expected by chance.

The first ganzfeld experiment was published in 1974 (Honorton and Harper 1974). Other researchers tried to replicate the findings, and there followed many years of argument and of improving techniques, culminating in the 1985 "Great Ganzfeld Debate” between Honorton (one of the originators of the method) and Hyman (a well-known critic). By this time several other researchers claimed positive results, often with quite large effect sizes. Both Hyman (1985) and Honorton (1985) carried out meta-analyses but came to opposite conclusions. Hyman argued that the results could all be due to methodological errors and multiple analyses, while Honorton claimed that the effect size did not depend on the number of flaws in the experiments and that the results were consistent, did not depend on any one experimenter, and revealed certain regular features of ESP. In a “joint communiquŽ” (Hyman and Honorton 1986) they detailed their points of agreement and disagreement and made recommendations for the conduct of future ganzfeld experiments

The ganzfeld achieved scientific respectability in 1994 when Bem and Honorton published a report in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin, bringing the research to the notice of a far wider audience. They republished Honorton’s earlier meta-analysis and reported impressive new results with a fully automated ganzfeld procedure — the Princeton autoganzfeld — claiming finally to have demonstrated a repeatable experiment. Not long afterwards Wiseman, Smith, and Kornbrot (1996) suggested that acoustic leakage might have been possible in the original autoganzfeld. This hypothesis was difficult to assess after the fact because by then the laboratory at Princeton had been dismantled. However, Bierman (1999) carried out secondary analyses which suggested that sensory leakage could not account for the results. Since then further successes have been reported from a new ganzfeld laboratory in Gothenburg, Sweden (Parker 2000), and at Edinburgh, where the security measures are very tight indeed (Dalton, Morris, Delanoy, Radin, Taylor, and Wiseman 1996). The debate continues

How can one draw reliable and impartial conclusions in such circumstances? I do not believe one can. My own conclusion is based not just on reading these published papers but also on my personal experience over many years. I have carried out numerous experiments of many kinds and never found any convincing evidence for psi (Blackmore 1996). I tried my first ganzfeld experiment in 1978, when the procedure was new. Failing to get results myself I went to visit Sargent’s laboratory in Cambridge where some of the best ganzfeld results were then being obtained. Note that in Honorton’s database nine of the twenty-eight experiments came from Sargent’s lab. What I found there had a profound effect on my confidence in the whole field and in published claims of successful experiments.

Questions About the Ganzfeld Research

These experiments, which looked so beautifully designed in print, were in fact open to fraud or error in several ways, and indeed I detected several errors and failures to follow the protocol while I was there. I concluded that the published papers gave an unfair impression of the experiments and that the results could not be relied upon as evidence for psi. Eventually the experimenters and I all published our different views of the affair (Blackmore 1987; Harley and Matthews 1987; Sargent 1987). The main experimenter left the field altogether

I would not refer to this depressing incident again but for one fact. The Cambridge data are all there in the Bem and Honorton review but unacknowledged. Out of twenty-eight studies included, nine came from the Cambridge lab, more than any other single laboratory, and they had the second highest effect size after Honorton’s own studies. Bem and Honorton do point out that one of the laboratories contributed nine of the studies but they do not say which one. Not a word of doubt is expressed, no references to my investigation are given, and no casual reader could guess there was such controversy over a third of the studies in the database

Of course the new autoganzfeld results appear even better. Perhaps errors from the past do not matter if there really is a repeatable experiment. The problem is that my personal experience conflicts with the successes I read about in the literature and I cannot ignore either side. I cannot ignore other people’s work because science is a collective enterprise and publication is the main way of sharing our findings. On the other hand I cannot ignore my own findings — there would be no point in doing science, or investigating other people’s work, if I did. The only honest reaction to the claims of psi in the ganzfeld is for me to say “I don't know but I doubt it.”

Similar problems occur in all areas of parapsychology. The CIA recently released details of more than twenty years of research into remote viewing and a new debate erupted over these results (Hyman 1995; Utts 1995). (See Ray Hyman, “Evaluation of the Military’s Twenty-Year Program in Psychic Spying” and ”The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs. Reality,” both in Skeptical Inquirer March/April 1996.) Whenever strong claims are made critics from both inside and outside of parapsychology get to work — as they should — but rarely is a final answer forthcoming.

These are some of the reasons why I cannot give a definitive and unbiased answer to my question “Are there any paranormal phenomena?” I can only give a personal and biased answer — that is, “probably not.”

But what if I am wrong and psi does really exist? What would this tell us about consciousness?

A common view seems to be something like this: If ESP exists it proves that mental phenomena are independent of space and time, and that information can get “directly into consciousness” without the need for sensory transduction or perceptual processing. If PK (psychokinesis) exists it proves that mind can reach out beyond the brain to affect things directly at a distance, i.e., that consciousness has a power of its own.

I suspect that it is a desire for this “power of consciousness” that fuels much enthusiasm for the paranormal. Parapsychologists have often been accused of wanting to prove the existence of the soul, and convincingly denied it (Alcock 1987). I suggest instead that parapsychologists want to prove the power of consciousness. In philosopher Dan Dennett’s (1995) terms they are looking for "skyhooks” rather than “cranes.” They want to find that consciousness can do things all by itself, without dependence on a complicated, physical, and highly evolved brain.

I have two reasons for doubting that they will succeed. First, parapsychologists must demonstrate that psi has something to do with consciousness and they have not yet done this. Second, there are theoretical reasons why I believe the attempt is doomed.

The Missing Link Between Psi and Consciousness

To make their case that psi actually involves consciousness, experiments rather different from those commonly done will be needed. Let’s consider the ganzfeld again. Do the results show that consciousness, in the sense of subjectivity or subjective experience, is involved in any way?

I would say no. There are several ways in which consciousness might, arguably, be involved in the ganzfeld, but there appears to be no direct evidence that it is. For example, are subjects conscious of their own success? Even in a very successful experiment the hits are mixed with many misses and the subjects themselves cannot say which is which (if they could the successful trials could be separated out and even better results obtained). In other words, the subject is unaware of the ESP even when it is occurring. Indeed in other contexts there have been claims that psi occurs unconsciously and can be detected only by physiological monitoring, such as in remote staring experiments (Braud, Shafer, and Andrews 1993) or by using sophisticated brain recording techniques (e.g., Don, McDonough, and Warren 1998).

The ganzfeld does involve a kind of mild altered state of consciousness. Indeed Honorton first used the technique as a way of deliberately inducing a “psi conducive state.” However, it has never been shown that this is a necessary concomitant of ESP in the ganzfeld. Experiments to do this might, for example, compare the scores of subjects who reported entering a deep altered state with those who did not. Or they might vary the ganzfeld conditions to be more or less effective at inducing altered states and compare the results. These kinds of experiments have not been done. In the absence of appropriate control conditions we have no idea what it is about the ganzfeld that is the source of its apparent success. It might be consciousness or the state of consciousness; it might be the time spent in the session, the personality of the experimenter, the color of the light shining on the subject’s eyes, or any of a huge number of untested variables. There is simply no evidence that consciousness is involved in any way.

Another example is recent experiments on the remote detection of staring (e.g., Braud, Shafer, and Andrews 1993). It has long been claimed that people can tell when someone else is looking at them, even from behind. Ingenious experiments now use video cameras and isolated subjects to test this claim. Results suggest that the staring and non-staring periods can be distinguished by physiological responses in the person being stared at. In other words, they are able to detect the staring — but not consciously. Oddly enough, these results are often described in terms of “consciousness interactions” even though the detection is explicitly non-conscious.

In related experiments subjects are asked to influence biological systems such as another person’s blood pressure or muscular activity, the spatial orientation of fish, movements of small mammals, or the rate of haemolysis of red blood cells. Influence and non-influence periods are randomly allocated and effects detected from the comparison. Braud and Schlitz (1991) call these "consciousness interactions with remote biological systems.” Yet again, I am not convinced that these data need have anything to do with consciousness. If the data are genuine then I agree with the authors that they show “a profound interconnectedness between the influencers and the influencees in these experiments” (p. 41). But what could be responsible? Any number of things may change in the influencer — such as muscle tone, cortical arousal, expectation, the firing of specific neurons, the activity in different neural nets, and so on. If there is such a thing as PK it might be related to any of these variables. For example some unknown force might emanate when a particular cortical firing pattern occurs and this be more likely when the influencer is trying to influence the system. Such an effect need have nothing to do with consciousness or subjectivity at all.

In PK experiments the claim that consciousness is involved is again made explicit, as in the title “The effects of consciousness on physical systems” (Radin and Nelson 1989). Yet, as far as I can see, there is no justification for this. In these experiments a subject typically sits in front of a computer screen and tries to influence the output of a random number generator (RNG), whose output is reflected in the display. Alternatively they might listen to randomly generated tones with the intention of making more of the tones high, or low, as requested, or they might try to affect the fall of randomly scattered balls or various other systems. The direction of aim is usually randomized and appropriate control trials are often run. It is claimed that, in extremely large numbers of trials, subjects are able to influence the output of the RNG. Is this an effect of consciousness on a physical system?

I don't see why. The experiments demonstrate a correlation between the output of the RNG and the direction of aim specified to the subject by the experimenter. This is certainly mysterious, but the leap from this correlation to a causal explanation involving “the effect of consciousness” is so far unjustified. The controls done show that the subject is necessary but in no way identify what it is about the subject’s presence that creates the effect. It might be their unconscious intentions or expectations; it might be some change in behavior elicited by the instructions given; it might be some hitherto unknown energy given off when subjects are asked to aim high or aim low. It might be some mysterious resonance between the RNG and the subject’s pineal gland.

As far as I know, no appropriate tests have been made to find out. For example, does the subject need to be conscious of the direction of aim at the time? Comments in the published papers suggest that some subjects actually do better when not thinking about the task, or when reading a magazine or being distracted in some other way, suggesting that conscious intent might even be counterproductive.

Perhaps this is not what is meant by consciousness here, but if not, then what is meant? Perhaps it is enough for the person to be conscious (i.e., awake), or perhaps the very presence of a person implies the presence of consciousness. In any case, to identify that the effect is actually due to consciousness, relevant experiments will have to be done. They might compare conditions in which subjects did or did not consciously know the target direction. Subjects might be asked on some trials to think consciously about the target and on others be distracted, or they might be put into different states of consciousness (or even unconsciousness) to see whether this affected the outcome. Such experiments might begin to substantiate the claim that consciousness is involved. Until then, it remains speculation.

Some parapsychologists have suggested to me that when they talk about consciousness affecting something they mean to include unconscious mental processes as well. Their claim would then be equivalent to saying that something (anything) about the person’s mind or brain affects it. However, if the term consciousness is broadened so far beyond the subjective, then we leave behind the really interesting questions that consciousness raises and, indeed, the whole reason why so many psychologists and philosophers are interested in consciousness at all. If we stick to subjectivity then I see no reason at all why paranormal claims, whether true or false, necessarily help us understand consciousness.

Theoretical Problems

The second reason I doubt that the paranormal power of consciousness will ever be proven is more theoretical. As our understanding of conscious experience progresses, the desire to find the “power of consciousness” sets parapsychology ever more against the rest of science (which may, of course, be part of its appeal). The more we look into the workings of the brain the less it looks like a machine run by a conscious self and the more it seems capable of getting on without one (e.g., Churchland and Sejnowski 1992; Crick 1994). There is no place inside the brain where consciousness resides, where mental images are "viewed,” or where instructions are “issued” (Dennett 1991). There is just massive parallel throughput with no obvious center.

Experiments such as those by Libet (1985) suggest that conscious experience takes some time to build up and is much too slow to be responsible for making things happen. For example, in sensory experiments he showed that about half a second of continuous activity in sensory cortex was required for conscious sensation, and in experiments on deliberate spontaneous action he showed that about the same delay occurred between the onset of the readiness potential in motor cortex and the timed decision to act — a long time in neuronal terms. Though these experiments are controversial (see the commentaries on Libet 1985; and Dennett 1991) they add to the growing impression that actions and decisions are made rapidly and only later does the brain weave a story about a self who is in charge and is conscious. In other words, consciousness comes after the action; it does not cause it.

This is just what some meditators and spiritual practitioners have been saying for millennia; that our ordinary view of ourselves, as conscious, active agents experiencing a real external world, is wrong. In other words we live in the illusion that we are a separate self. In mystical experiences this separate self dissolves and the world is experienced as one — actions happen but there is no separate actor who acts. Long practice at meditation or mindfulness can also dispel the illusion. Now science seems to be coming to the same conclusion — that the idea of a separate conscious self is false.

Parapsychology, meanwhile, is going quite the other way. It is trying to prove that consciousness really does have power; that our minds can reach out and "do” things, not only within our own bodies but beyond them as well. In this sense it is deeply dualist even while making reference to interconnectedness. Parapsychology is often perceived as being more “spiritual” than conventional science. I think it may be quite the other way around.

With the welcome upsurge of interest in consciousness, and the number of scientists and philosophers now interested in the field, I look forward to great progress being made out of our present confusion. I hope it will be possible to bring together the spiritual insights with the scientific ones — so that research can reveal what kind of illusion we live in, how it comes about, and perhaps even help us to see our way out of it. As far as this hope is concerned parapsychology seems to be going backwards — hanging onto the idea of consciousness as an agent separate from the rest of the world. This is why I doubt that evidence for psi, even if it is valid, will help us to understand consciousness.

References

• Alcock, J.E. 1987. Parapsychology: Science of the anomalous or search for the soul? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10: 553P643 (plus commentaries by other authors).
• Bem, D.J., and C. Honorton. 1994. Does psi exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin 115 4P18.
• Bierman, D.J. 1999. The PRL autoganzfeld revisited: Refuting the sound leakage hypothesis. Journal of Parapsychology 63: 271P274.
• Blackmore, S.J. 1987 A report of a visit to Carl Sargent’s laboratory. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 54: 186P198.
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• Braud, W., D. Shafer, and S. Andrews. 1993. Reactions to an unseen gaze (remote attention): A review, with new data on autonomic staring detection. Journal of Parapsychology 57: 373P390.
• Churchland, P.S., and T.J. Sejnowski. 1992. The Computational Brain. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
• Crick, F. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis. New York: Scribner’s.
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Acknowledgment

Thanks to the Perrott-Warrick Fund for financial support.

In my first demonstration Sheldrake argues that the three subjects (Ss) who "stood up, looked around, shifted their positions several times, and appeared to be momentarily distressed . . .” still could have been aware of being stared at. Sheldrake also states “a sensitivity to being stared at does not necessarily imply an awareness of the position of the starer.” True, but "being momentarily distracted, etc.” does not prove the Ss knew they were being stared at either! A distraction could have myriad causes. As for the two others (i.e., the “paranoid” and the “psychic”) where is the evidence they are "more sensitive than most” to the detection of being stared at? How are "psychics” and “paranoids” identified and evaluated?

In my second demonstration Sheldrake argues there are pairs of unexplained numbers (e.g., 0801, 0802, etc.). By no means are these numbers “unexplained.” On page 38 of my SI article a sample subject’s time sheet clearly states time in minutes from start at 0800 pm and then lists 0801, 0802, etc. through 0820. Since each S’s starting time differed from other Ss, there were different numbers for each S. The time sheet on page 38 was merely an example.

I can unequivocally state that none of the experimental Ss had any difficulty understanding what they were supposed to do and acted appropriately.

Sheldrake was correct however in the fact that on the sample time sheet on page 38 of my SI article the last line of the text states “five times for two minutes each during the experimental period.” This, of course, is an error. It should have read “for one minute each. . . .”

Sheldrake’s argument that by allowing Ss to change their prior guesses would distract them from their immediate feelings I find totally unconvincing.

Finally, Sheldrake’s attempt to shoot down the results of my two demonstrations has failed completely and I stand firmly with my original conclusion that “it is prudent to conclude that people cannot tell when they are being stared at.”