The Onesimus Programme

Part One cont.
How Psychics Get Information About the People Who Visit Them by Perfectly Natural Means, While People Are Assuming They Got It Through Psychic Power

But whether deliberate or not, psychics gain information they can deduce things about the client from by using a number of perfectly natural techniques. A lot of psychics are aware that the things people are likely to want insight into fall into a very few main areas: relationship issues, career and financial worries, and health. They can use that knowledge to say they can sense the person visiting them has, or has had in the past, or will have in the future, three main areas of concern, but there's only time to talk about one. They'll ask the customer to choose which one they'd like to talk about, and immediately the customer answers, they have information about what's concerning the customer. They can guess more about the customer by thinking about what's most likely to be concerning someone of their age, ethnicity, class and financial circumstances, which they can get some idea of by looking for clues such as the way the customer dresses, the kind of car they have, whether they're wearing jewellery and what kind of quality it is, and things like that.) They guess at what kind of problems someone of the kind they assess the customer as being is likely to have. For instance, a young person might be more likely to have career concerns and an old person is likely to be concerned about declining health. A middle-aged person might well be concerned about the behaviour of their teenage children, and so on.

The psychic will look at the customer's body language to get clues as to whether they're making good guesses about what's bothering them or not, and how much the customer wants them to carry on talking about the thing they've mentioned. Often the customer will tell the psychic how close they're getting and give clues by talking a bit about the things the psychic's brought up. If what the psychic says isn't relevant to the customer's concerns, they'll be able to pick up on that quickly by the customer's facial expression, eye movements and so on. They'll use those clues to tell them to change the subject a bit. When they're closer to what's concerning the customer, they'll be able to pick up on that by the customer's facial expressions and so on.

So soon, they can be guided by all the clues to say things that are highly relevant to the customer. The customer will likely assume they're doing it by psychic ability, even reading their mind. And if they've fallen for the claims the psychic has made about what they can do, and they're awed by the psychic's charisma and the surroundings that will have been purposely given a mystical air, then they'll often let their guard down and take the psychic into their confidence, telling them things about what's bothering them.

Some people who were very clear about the fact they weren't psychics have used the techniques psychics use and have impressed people with their accuracy, convincing them they were real psychics before they told them the truth.

Other techniques psychics can use to gain information they can pass off as having known all along, or to impress the customer or make them want to come back for more readings, can include:

• Finding out something about the person before the appointment for the psychic reading, perhaps via a friend, and pretending to be revealing it as new information they couldn't possibly have known by natural means;
• Making things happen to impress the client that are really done by trickery. For instance, some might claim to be able to move objects by the power of their mind. They might pretend to prove it by, for example, holding out their hand with a match stick in it and holding their hand still while the match stick moves around. The trick can be done if there's a little nail hidden in the matchstick and their hand's near a magnet.
• Scaring the client into coming back for more readings, for instance by getting them to spit into a glass, then secretly adding some black dye to it to make it look like blood and telling the client the fact it's turned to blood means they're cursed and they need to pay money to have the curse removed.

That doesn't mean all psychics are deliberate frauds. They don't all use deliberate trickery such as making objects move in natural ways and claiming they're using the power of their mind to move them or it's being done supernaturally. Many just use the techniques of picking up clues from what the customer says and their body language, and making some guesses, and genuinely believe they're using a psychic gift. It would be wrong to say that no one ever genuinely does have one, because no one can be sure. But science has never found any evidence for psychic power really existing. And there have been former psychics who have said they eventually realised what they were really doing.

How Scientific Tests of Psychic Phenomena Have Never Found Any Genuine Extra-Sensory Ability

A lot of studies have been done into whether psychic phenomena exist for over 100 years. But no evidence that it works has ever been found. Some studies have at first seemed to show that things like clairvoyance, telepathy and the like really happen, but later it's been discovered that deliberate fraud took place. Either that, or the study was badly designed, so they got results that they thought were evidence of psychic phenomena, when really they were evidence of something entirely different and they didn't realise. For instance, things that allow people to cheat can be overlooked. Or the success rate a person could have purely by chance could be underestimated, so a higher success rate than that gets put down to genuine psychic ability when it isn't.

Examples of Experiments of Psychic Ability That Seemed Genuine at First But Weren't

One of the first people to conduct experiments of telepathy and clairvoyance was called J B Rhine, in the 1930s. People had previously set out to debunk the claims of people calling themselves spiritualist mediums but who used trickery to make people think they were conjuring up the dead in séances. But this man had a laboratory in a university where he did experiments of psychic ability. He asked several people to try to tell him which of five symbols - a cross, a circle, a rectangle, a star or wavy lines - was on the concealed side of various cards he took from a pack. He compared the number of correct answers each person gave with the number he thought they could be expected to give if they were just guessing.

Sometimes it was telepathy he tried to test that way, by having someone looking at the image and trying to send it via thought waves to another person. Sometimes he tried to test clairvoyance, by putting a card face-down on the table without anyone having seen it and seeing if people could tell what it was.

He tested a lot of people, and concluded there was strong evidence that telepathy and clairvoyance existed. At first, what he'd done seemed like good scientific evidence, since it had been done under conditions that would supposedly eliminate the possibility of cheating. But as more details came to light about the tests, people began to discover there had been problems with it:

Some people who'd been tested seemed more gifted than others. But people began to suspect they were just better at cheating. It turned out that some of the people being tested had been allowed to shuffle and handle the cards themselves before the experiment, which would enable people good at looking for clues about what was where to spot them. One person in particular was good at doing that and had an impressive success rate, ... except when people other than the experimenter were watching.

Also, the cards weren't all manufactured to the highest quality, so an observant test subject could tell what some of them were by things like warped edges, spots on the backs, or other imperfections. The symbols on some of them could even be read through their backs under certain lighting conditions.

Also, there were questions about how effective shuffling is at really mixing up all the cards anyway. It can be easy to miss some parts of the pack or not to do that good a job so they're not in all that much of a different order from what they were before.

Because of the strong doubts over the reliability of those studies, they're not often mentioned nowadays as evidence for clairvoyance and telepathy. But no unquestionably strong evidence has ever been found by other studies either.

After Rhine's experiments, a set of experiments was done by a different person, mathematician G S Soal. They seemed to have been designed better. People claiming to have telepathic ability were tested to see if they could tell what a number of pictures were when someone tried to send them via their thoughts. At first, he failed to find any evidence of telepathy. A lot of people were disappointed. Then it was suggested that perhaps there was a bit of a delay in people picking up telepathic signals, so the pictures they thought they were being sent were really the ones sent the previous time. He looked and said he'd found a couple of people who were gifted after all. He tested them lots more times, and concluded that some people had telepathic ability after all. Because he had previously failed to find evidence of telepathic ability, people assumed he must be an honest unbiased researcher who really must have found evidence of it this time. For years not much could be said to challenge the conclusions of the research, since it seemed to have been designed well. It was considered strong evidence by many. But eventually it came to light that the mathematician had altered the records to make it look as if people were making a lot more correct guesses than could be expected by chance when they weren't really. Eventually, it was discovered beyond all doubt that the records had been altered.

Sometimes the design of an experiment seems to have been good and no obvious fraud has been committed. But one experiment on its own can't be seen as proof of anything, since there's always the possibility there was some kind of cheating, or there might have been mistakes in the design of the experiment after all. So experimenters need to explain in detail how their experiment was done, so others can try it. Only if the design of the experiment was indeed good so as to eliminate the possibility of cheating or mistakes, and if several others get similarly impressive results when they try it, can evidence of anything significant be said to have been found.
By Diana Holbourn