Science articles that make the mainstream news tend towards the controversial (after all, who’s going to read an article titled “Journal’s Paper on Paramecium Expected to Prompt Noncommittal Shrugs”?). Still, one of last week’s headlines would have seemed extraordinary if it had appeared in the National Enquirer, let alone the New York Times. If you think you know what I’m about to say – well, you might be right. ESP, long believed to exist only in 1950s science fiction novels, has now entered the realm of scientific literature (specifically, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). From the Times:
The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.
In an interview, Dr. Bem, the author of the original paper and one of the most prominent research psychologists of his generation, said he intended each experiment to mimic a well-known classic study, “only time-reversed.”
In one classic memory experiment, for example, participants study 48 words and then divide a subset of 24 of them into categories, like food or animal. The act of categorizing reinforces memory, and on subsequent tests people are more likely to remember the words they practiced than those they did not.
In his version, Dr. Bem gave 100 college students a memory test before they did the categorizing — and found they were significantly more likely to remember words that they practiced later. “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words,” the paper concludes.
If you think this sounds far-fetched, you’re not alone. Many scientists have criticized the publication of the paper, arguing that the evidence is insufficient to support Dr. Bem’s “extraordinary claims.” I’m a skeptic by nature, and it’s easy to see how a flawed statistical analysis of the data could lead to a positive finding where none really exists (especially because the supposed effect is small). And yet…I’m not willing to dismiss the possibility of ESP out of hand. After all, research into the paranormal is hardly new – J.B. Rhine was already investigating ESP at Duke University in the 1930s.
Across disciplines and experimental frameworks, scientists are charged with relying on evidence rather than preconceived notions of how the universe works. This is especially important when the evidence seems to run contrary to accepted dogma (ulcers, anyone?). If future studies manage to replicate the effects observed by Dr. Bem, it will only reemphasize what we already know – that the real universe and the minds it holds are stranger and more wonderful than any work of fiction.
