Psi and brain activity?

Been going through old threads for awhile, so I’m not sure whose still active here haha

So I’ve gone through a lot of psi phases and I’d say I’m more skeptical than not, but there’s one thing that does kind of seem somewhat convincing

In terms of studies, I have 3 that concern me here

This study didn’t neccessarily prove psi at all, since the results were at chance. But how is it that these researchers seem to consistently get results that kind of defy logic/causation?

Essentially the idea here is that they can detect a certain pattern in a brain state that occurs when a subject is shown a correct target vs a wrong one, and these researchers have done this experiment 4 times now.

I can’t post articles, but if you look up the bolder it’ll show up as the first or second option on the browser, I have the abstract tho (for the first one it’s on semantic scholar, the second one is on ncbi)

Differential event-related potentials to targets and decoys in a guessing task

Quote:

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 20 sub- jects performing a computerized, forced-choice guessing task. On each of 40 trials, ERPs were elicited by digitized images of 4 playing cards, sequentially presented on a video monitor for 150 ms. After the last card was presented, subjects guessed which of the 4 cards would be the target for that trial. Fol- lowing the subject’s guess, the computer randomly selected one of the 4 cards to be the target and presented this as feedback; the remaining 3 cards served as nontarget decoys for the trial. We found that a negative Slow Wave measured at 150–500 ms post-stimulus had greater amplitude when elicited by targets than when elicited by nontarget decoys (p .05). This result indicates an ap- parent communications anomaly because no viable conventional explanation of the ERP differential could be identified. It is the fourth study in our labora- tory employing essentially the same design to yield this or a similar ERP ef- fect. Keywords:

I realize it’s not neccessarily proof of psi at all, but how is this possible? I can think of 2 ways.

1. Some sort of measurement error,
2. Fraud or file drawer error

All this is basically saying is that when we see something that’s a correct option vs an incorrect option regardless of whether the subject knows whether or not the option is correct or incorrect, and controlled for differences in the target.

The first test was done with Malcolm Bessent, whose a known “psychic.” The second and third test were done with non psi selected participants

Persinger study on ingo swann

Quote:

In the present study, the artist Ingo Swann, who helped develop the process of remote viewing (awareness of distant objects or places without employing normal senses), was exposed during a single setting of 30 min. to specific patterns of circumcerebral magnetic fields that significantly altered his subjective experiences. Several times during subsequent days, he was asked to sit in a quiet chamber and to sketch and to describe verbally distant stimuli (pictures or places) beyond his normal senses. The proportions of unusual 7-Hz spike and slow wave activity over the occipital lobes per trial were moderately correlated (rho=.50) with the ratings of accuracy between these distal, hidden stimuli and his responses. A neuropsychological assessment and Magnetic Resonance Imaging indicated a different structural and functional organization within the parieto-occipital region of the subject's right hemisphere from organizations typically noted. The results suggest that this type of paranormal phenomenon, often dismissed as methodological artifact or accepted as proofs of spiritual existence, is correlated with neurophysiological processes and physical events. Remote viewing may be enhanced by complex experimentally generated magnetic fields designed to interact with the neuromagnetic "binding factor" of consciousness.

Persinger on remote viewing. He studied a guy called ingo swann, a known remote viewer, and found a correlation in terms of his accuracy vs high alpha wave spikes and the same pattern in the experiment above. I’m not sure how good his overall accuracy was. I’m not sure how consistent this result is overall however.

So I guess I have 2 questions from this

1. Are there any problems with the first paper in terms of data analysis, or selective reporting of the brain data, because that’s the only real problem I can think of there. But how is the idea that there is a predictable brain activity when we see a correct target vs an incorrect target even possible?

2. What do we make of the idea that remote viewing (and psi related things in general) accuracy seem to have a correlation with brain activity? Regardless of the total hit rate or not, the fact that most experiments seem to find a correlation of high alpha activity and psi accuracy is really weird.

Now I’m not sure how constant this correlation is, and I find that finding studies that don’t replicate or show no effect are harder to find and probably don’t get published as much, so that could explain the second effect. Furthermore, if it was real you would think there would be a study right now where they attempt to discern the accuracy just by using the brain activity to test it but I don’t think this has ever been done (like basically if there’s a trend in data, researchers are generally not gonna publish a paper showing an opposite trend, specifically parapsychology researchers)

I’m stumped for the first one though. Not neccessarily that it proves or disproves psi, but just the idea that you can tell if someone sees a correct or incorrect target by trends in brain activity, regardless of prior knowledge. I haven’t seen anything responding to or against this paper either so I’m pretty confused here.

Again, I don’t think there’s any evidence of psi ability, but more so that it just doesn’t make sense how something like this is possible outside of fraud

Edit: found something a bit interesting

Experiment one found slow waves of activity from the 400-500ms mark after exposer

Experiment Two, I couldn’t find a lot of info on, but while they found slow wave differences it was in one hemisphere rather than both like in experiment one

Experiment three found it from the 150-400ms mark after exposure, the 400-500 mark approached significance but didn’t reach it. They said this was their hypothesis that they’d find trends in both spots, and they added the first one after seeing a trend here and revisiting their earlier data, but somehow I doubt that lol

Experiment four found it from the 150-500ms mark after exposure.

So while slow waves were constant, from one to two it was only found in one hemisphere, and from 2 to three they changed the timing, and from 3 to 4 they decided to make the time the 2 timing they contested from 3 to 4 combined

In the abstract they said the hypothesized this, (for the three one) but from a book excerpt from the author
I wonder how much of this was post hoc, and if there were possible failed experiments before this that they didn’t produce. 1 and 2 occurred in the same year (1992), although it was the same subject. 3 and 4 on the other hand, occurred in 1998 and 2002.


Persinger also lowkey doesn’t strike me as someone super reliable, considering the god helmet replication thing where he got salty at a replication attempt by another team that he apparently approved of because it failed

Also, there was a 2008 study on a similar task by an fmri. I don’t think an fmri measures the same things, but they found nothing, and the study was probably better

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/34ZHTQm