testing psychic powers in high school

A curious belief that I keep running into in the intolerantly faithful is the assumption that the sort of godless people who put their trust in science and, of course, evolution, would also believe in ghosts. This is a bit ironic coming from the church of the supernatural (fundamentalists rely on the influence of the supernatural as an alternative explanation for many things), and more or less completely nonsensical.

But let's see if I can give any support for that assumption.

The story takes place when I was in high school. I was taking a psychology class, which actually provided a limited means of understanding the obsessive quests that the religiously insane undertake. Like the anti homosexuality quest right now. The concept was that when someone can't accept some aspect of themselves, like if they find themselves even slightly curious about homosexuality, but they were raised in an intolerant fundamentalist world, then to deal with it they fight violently against that aspect of themselves.
All I have to say with regards to that is Ted Haggard. It doesn't explain his Meth use, that's a bit extreme even for what I've come to expect.. but basically I suspect the people that rail against things like that the most are doing it out of fear of an aspect of themselves and an inability to come to terms with it.

But anyway, the class. One day we did a quaint little psychic power test. It was kind of like what was shown in the beginning of Ghostbusters, if anyone remembers that.. Bill Murray was testing two people for psychic power by showing them each in turn a card drawn from a deck. The cards had a small number of distinct shapes, like wavy lines, and the person being tested presumably used their psychic power to intuit the identity of the pattern.
Only we just used ordinary playing cards. To make things simple we only tested for the identity of the suit of the card, so we had to pick from four possibilities, hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades. We broke into groups of two and tested each other in turn.

Basically, the idea is that through random chance we should get a right answer roughly 25% of the time, one out of four, since there were only four possible answers.

If you're expecting me to say that I got 60% correct you're in for a disappointment. I don't actually remember my score at all, but I know that the class as a whole averaged close to 25%. We didn't have anyone exhibiting significant accuracy, I'd guess that nobody scored above 30%.

But if you took the results of the entire class and averaged them, the results were slightly above 25%. A small enough number that it COULD be due to random chance.
It turns out that our teacher had kept track of the numbers she'd gotten after doing this for many years. We could see the numbers for each class. The numbers were fairly consistent in that most of them showed that slight but apparently statistically significant advantage over random chance. A truly random situation should get closer to the perfect random number the more times you run it, but this one seemed to prefer staying just ahead of chance.

And that was it. No great explanation from the teacher. We put away the oh so intriguing numbers and moved on to more ordinary subjects. I always liked that, she showed us this very interesting concept, appeared to give us evidence for the existence of a supernatural phenomena, and then put it away. So we were left to form our own conclusions.

So of course I'll say what I think. I'm biased, I'd like to find evidence that such things are real. It'd be neat to believe that the human mind has that sort of potential. You have to be careful with a bias like that, but I try to keep it in check.
I want to believe that the results suggest that everyone has a slight psychic potential. Perhaps it's some innate ability that we have to develop to make use of, and since we don't as a society understand it we never develop it.
I have absolutely no problem with that concept. I have no problem with the possibility that something supernatural could exist, because in all likelihood if it was common enough and widely accepted enough to be studied we could probably find out how it works. It's only supernatural because we don't understand it.
However I can't say that this is undeniable proof that such things exist either. If you want another explanation they do exist. First off I'm not a statistician so I can't offer detailed analysis of the numbers, I can't say how strong the variation was. Secondly there's always the possibility that the person holding the card (who can see it) was somehow unintentionally communicating the identity of the card's suit. I don't think that's very likely, it would have to be a completely unintentional, even unconscious means of communicating.
Basically it would appear that the person being tested had a means of identifying the card that was only slightly effective. Perhaps they were able to unconsciously perceive a hint of color reflected in the eyes of the person holding the cards that gave them a clue as to the hint of the suit.


The experiment gave us no answers, only a question. In a way I have to applaud that, I hear so much about the idea that our schools are training kids to take specific tests, or preparing them to be followers rather than leaders. That's partially why I took the psychology class, it wasn't about knowledge that I'd be expected to have. I wanted a little insight into the workings of the human mind. The fact that I got the teacher to call me perverse was the icing on the cake.
No, that's not really what it sounds like. I was talking about how I'm at least mildly phobic about spiders, and yet deeply fascinated by them at the same time. She said that that was perverse, that's all.


I feel like I'm just asking to be ostracized from the anti creationist community, you tend to get a lot of hard core atheists in there who reject a whole variety of things, with such concepts as ESP and UFOs ranking right up there with creationism. Unfortunately I've also seen a UFO, so I'm not scoring too highly at the moment.

But make of it what you will. I have no definite proof for the concept of ESP, and as a result I can't really say I believe in it. But it wouldn't come as a terrible surprise to me if one day it were proven to exist. Senses that to us seem extra ordinary exist all over the animal kingdom. Sharks (and oddly enough the duck billed platypus, the duck bill is actually loaded with special receptors) have the ability to sense the electrical activity of living organisms. Perhaps if we could do that it might have been interpreted as seeing "auras", before we understood enough about science to know about the electrical fields. Birds can navigate by sensing the magnetic field of the Earth. Astrology was founded on the concept that the "heavens" influence life on Earth, but we now know that the Moon actually DOES influence life.

For a total non sequitur, my desperate attempt to get out of this post now that I'm risking getting stuck in new age mumbo jumbo.. when I was younger still, in grade school, the mother of one of my friends refused to add sugar when she made kool-aid, on the belief that sugar caused diabetes. In private I told my mother (college trained as a med-tech) about that and we shared a superior chuckle at how backward she was.
Well it turns out that exposure to too much sugar CAN bring on diabetes. Doh. If anyone is reading this and feels that that's a gratuitous over simplification, well.. tough.. feel free to comment and explain the issue in greater depth, I don't understand it well enough to describe it even half decently.
In self defense I'll mention that she also believed that getting your feet wet in the winter would give you pneumonia. My friend was walking on ice (over shallow water, just a puddle on the side of the road) and one of his feet broke through and fell into the water. I'm not really sure how wet his food even got, but he was seriously upset because his mother would be mad at him, and he'd get pneumonia.
Needless to say, he remained pneumonia free.