A recent article published by Daryl Bem, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University, suggests precognition from being a reality. Bem itself remains largely skeptical, there was little such virtuous parapsychological community response. Bem team asked participants to view a series of objects (if he has written the ball, they were to visualize a ball) and gave them a surprise free callback test where they were told to type in as many words as they could remember the previous given set. Following this, they were an activity which involves a series of words they have already been said to remember. Bem, study participants said the words included in activity significantly better than the words which were not. If all the rest is controlled, the only solution may be implicit repetition of words in a callback test boosts performance after that actually took place!
So what appears to be the problem? Daryl Bem apparently followed all protocols right, controlled for the good things and yet it faces relentless attacks on the newspaper which allowed the paper to be "let through" peer review in the first place. Why seems the scientific community generally not prepared to accept evidence of parapsychological phenomena? One of the reasons often cited by supporters of parapsychology are scientists and the cognitive sciences in particular, these results will be irreconcilible with the modern understanding of the brain and mind. When faced with requests by parapsychological researchers, cognitive scientists often have to integrate their knowledge about the brain as a unit of information processing is separated into modules that interact to form representation from the outside world with these mysterious ideas. Often, I guess mostly in the biologically applied, this appears to be near impossible and much throw as a defect in the statistics, poor research or fraud. It raises questions, they are wrong to do so, and are they closed-minded? As the great late Carl Sagan often recalled, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
However, when Jeff Tollaksen and his team have shown that measurements on quantum particles in the future can affect their behaviour in the present, the cries of skepticism have nowhere levels of those addressed to Bem. Naturally, there are differences between the two. On the one hand, Tollaksen shown experimentally something which was already a theoretical possibility, and many has also assumed. Another person, arising out of the first is that the theoretical framework and mechanisms that past the phenomenon was already settled makes it much easier to explain. In the case of Bem, there is very little suggestions on how something like this can occur and no reply to modern standards of a scientific theory. This simple fact that there is no mechanism known for how this might happen is one thing, another is that these experiences have not been adequately replicated. Bem agrees with this and said in an interview with NewScientist "replication is the gold standard of whether if you believe something". It has always been a problem in science experiments that acquire no statistically significant results are very unlikely to be published when the phenomenon under investigation has not been widely recognized in the community. After all, why would anyone report that, contrary to belief, pigs cannot fly?
Of course, a phenomenon should not be dismissed just because there is no known laws which allows it to be possible. However, parapsychology has a poor record when it's honest and good research, and often no relationship is found in experiments are replicated by skeptical scientists. When this happens in the rest of the academic community, a tent generally explain abnormal results. Unfortunately, parapsychological research papers lack the science key ingredient: the skepticism and open-mindedness. Perhaps more important, that a scientist can have is able to realize his own ideas may be incorrect. Parapsychological researchers often control for shell variables like psychokinesis (moving objects to the power of the spirit), mind-reading - you name, that is! Obviously, the problem here is that these so-called variables are not variable at all. They are fictional constructions until they are proven by years of rigorous to be otherwise research. How you imagine astrophysicists would show their colleagues in another area of research, if they were controlling variables such as unicorns and brownies in their experiences?
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