DEMYSTICON 2025 ANNUAL MEETING IN PORTUGAL!!! June 12-16: demystifysci.com/demysticon-2025 Listen on the go at all podcast locations: anchor.fm/demystifysci Material solutions to quantum spookiness: www.youtube.com/@MaterialAtomics Short films @DemystifySciInvestigates: ua-cam.com/channels/UfzVdgNu2xLThgM2qQZmSQ.html
Well here's the thing guys. Dianne Powell has been pretty explicit that these are not rigorous laboratory experiments and that she hopes that the podcast will help generate the funding for more standardized experiments. But regardless, the fact of the matter is that the VAST majority of human beliefs are not established by rigorously controlled laboratory experiments. We form beliefs by looking at the world, observing patterns, and making adjustments as needed - and that is not a limitation or a bug. The beliefs that matter to us are the ones that are actually relevant to our lives and lived experiences, and laboratory experiments are part of lived experiments for a veeeeeery tiny percentage of human beings. Another thing worth mentioning here is the way in which experimental methodologies implicitly endorse reductionistic assumptions. The idea is that you try to isolate as many variables as you possibly can, eo as to **isolate** a mechanistic causal connection between input and output conditions. This is very effective for certain purposes, but, if we take this to be a universal epistemic standard, then it necessarily presumes a world in which wholes are NOT more than the sum of their parts. The reality is that we live in a world of complex, living systems, and for that reason it is necessarily the case that not all real phenomena are going to be demonstrable under laboratory conditions, wnd that includes many phenomena which we simply take for granted in our daily lives.
Not commenting on the other things you wrote but ask AI for studies done on facilitated communication relating to telepathy/ shared consciousness. The AI can pull so so many studies and they all point in the same direction, hypothesis busted. Dianne Powell and her said to be skeptic DP definitely made a really interesting podcast. Beyond that there isn’t much to the story to all of our dismay. I’m not sure if the studies were done to anyone’s satisfaction but at least some must be more rigorous than trusting moms in hardship right? Heart goes out to the families of course. Read some studies and make a video on if they are worth while. I’d love to see it. There are PLENTY of studies to choose from. Throw a dart in the ocean you’ll hit water.
The mom/child connection is so amazing! My eldest son had a horrific skateboarding accident while I was in Spain, and I knew it immediately. I knew what part of his body, and was fairly hysterical until I could get in touch. Moms still have stem cells from their children in their brains!
This is a great topic for discussion. The telepathy experiments with the autistic children were a far cry from Dean Radin’s work and I agree that they were very poor science. I also agree with the spirit in which you critcised the videos. It’s hard to be overly critical of the parents involved. The same cannot be said of the researchers. There is undoubtedly a lot of wishful thinking going on with the parents and it’s not hard for me to imagine apologies on their behalf. But the connection you made to better known scientific endeavours is entirely valid, in my opinion. Who knows what tricks could be deployed in data manipulation or modelling to coax the right results out of experiments? It goes without saying that they would be considerably more sophisticated than the contributions of the parents in the Telepathy Tapes. This also relates to your conversation with Martin Lopez where he pointed out that the big money investments in science are hardly exploratory at all. We invest where we expect to find results that confirm ideas we already hold. In that case, how much pressure was there on researchers at the LHC to find the Higgs Boson? Or on those at LIGO to detect black holes colliding? In other words, how trustworthy are those outcomes given the billions of dollars’ worth of wishful thinking behind the projects? Pierre-Marie Robitaille has already laid bare the manipulation of CMB data that led to the Cosmic Anisotropy Map and many people are aware that “first image of a black hole” came from data processed according to a model of what was expected. Personally, I’m extremely sceptical of these ideas. My experience of working in research suggests that there is both grift and wishful thinking. If I were to make a sweeping generalisation, I’d say that it probably depends on the ambition of the people involved. Absent any high ambitions for a Nobel Prize or well-paid tenure, it’s just about possible to carve out a research career by living from grant to grant that you obtain through being able to make a good pitch. However, I’d say that wishful thinking plays a much larger part. Being right is pretty important to most people but it reaches an existential level for a scientist. How can you have any authority or social standing as a scientist if you are wrong? When a scientist is defending their ideas they are fighting for the survival of their reputation, their self-esteem, their being. Who wouldn’t fight dirty with such high stakes?
The Telepathy Tapes is important because it is shown that there is strange phenomenon going on, and it brings brings the topic to the popular audience. This should elicit more rigorous experimentation, but it is how science evolves; someone sees an anomaly, and they look closer. If the strangeness persists, further testing is needed.
I think that the high salaries in tech come from the FOMO of the wealthiest business people. There is a history of promising tech attracting colossal investment. Sometimes that has paid off, sometimes not. But for wealthy investors you have to be in it to win it.
Ok episode 1’s criticism (mom holding kid’s head): totally fair criticism if we are talking about scientific rigor. It’s not rigorous enough. NOW, if you actually pay attention to the precision, it is hard to argue that the child doesn’t have some ability. Plus, it is not entirely clear that the mom is actually leading the movement of the child’s head. The child might be leading the movement
I think we need to remember to apply Peirce's pragmatic principle - consider what it would imply about the world if we took the proposition seriously that the autistic kids are being coached or manipulated in order to deceive the researchers, or that the researchers are acting deceptively. Not trusting the data in these studies is not the same as not trusting it in cases of honest fallibility - great care would have to be taken to hide this personal deception, and I see no sign whatsoever of this.
Thank you for this video! I watched an interview about the telepathy tapes and knew something was not right, I just did not know what it was. I appreciate your dedication to showing the mechanisms behind the magic tricks!
24:53 it doesnt look like she is wandering around the board, it looks like her hand is going in a direct line over the intermediate letters towards the correct letter. to me at least
Damn, I wanna believe. Thanks for diving into this, you both navigated the subject beautifully. The M.D. involved knows it doesn’t meet scientific rigor and I heard has obtained some funding to do research at UVA possibly in faraday cage etc. Let’s hope in a few years there will be more reliable findings!
24:30 - watch the section with 0,25x speed - I think you can clearly detect that the mother only moves the the board away once the test subjects "taps" on a specific letter. You can also see that the girl generally moves into the right direction almost immediatly once the board is placed. I think that in this particular experiment, fascilitated communication is not the best explanation for what we see. But then again, I agree with your skepticism because some of the other experiments are highly flawed in their methodology.
Same with the boy, his fingers seem to me to be in the right spot as soon as he starts moving it towards the board, his obvious lack of dexterity probably led to some errors and is making it hard to decide. It would be easy to make a test that doesn't involve the parents at all, or at least doesn't involve them controlling the board.
@@isma3il2005 Yeah I completely agree! The only thing that keeps a sour aftertaste is that there are just so many painfully obvious things you could have controlled for accurately - but that did not happen. If this is a real thing, then it should be reproduceable even under strict conditions - I will remain agnostic until then.
At the same time a podcast that i follow had the director of the " telepathy tapes" as a guest, Jessie Michaels released a 2 hour video about it. That was enough of a red flag for me to skip it. Now that i see the videos I'm even more confused , why this even required so much exposure. I hope funds acquired through the sales go straight to the kids that need them.
@shauncy7 not Jessie per se but both videos popped in my feed on the same day in the same hour. And the podcast is in UK. So there is some release schedule for maximum impact,so i got suspicious. Maybe i wasn't clear enough in the previous post,I hope that clears things out.
One of the reasons that telepathy and psychic communication is probably impossible to study in a lab is that these types of communications, in my experience, have to do with meaning and necessity, they are not mechanical and reproducible.
I've always wondered where belief ends and evidence begins. Can you have evidence without belief? I feel like sometimes we like to pretend that we don't choose our versions of evidence, as if the roadblock that stops us from believing in anything isn't ultimately ourselves and we push the responsibility on to others to somehow force us to change our chosen beliefs. If you wish to believe something than no one could stop you except you.
From Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris: Wherefore the Egyptians think that little children possess the power of prophecy, and they try to divine the future from the portents which they find in children's words, especially when children are playing about in holy places and crying out whatever chances to come into their minds.
I kinda believe it. I'll feel like I'm being watched, and within 5 seconds receive a reply on twitter. Or I'll think of my brother or mother and get a message or call from them within 5 seconds. It might just be good timing... but its happened so many times that I feel something is there. Kinda like a 6th sense that some people might be more intuned to feeling....
24:53 if we could see tha numbers on the tablet, that could clarify why the mom is retracting the board when she does. She could be retracting it after the mom see that the child has put an input on the tablet. But the tablet is too bright to see.
You can see Frank Zappa as an early autistic, or at least with Asperger´s Syndrome. What happens when there are many small ischemia, due to insult to the system. These can interfere with sense processing.. Often, the individual will develop one sense of ability due to the fact that other senses are not functioning properly. Like Stevie Wonder´s musical ability, perhaps due to his limited vision. Autistics have less access to human emotion and connection, but often are good at mathematical pursuits. They may be early experiments in trans humanism. There are many ways of accessing information. I have been naturally psychic all my life. My son who has Down´s Syndrome has taught me even more about non verbal communication, extending to other life forms. I recently discovered the work of Walter Russell, `The Secret of Light´. I'm mostly self taught in science, but I love the careful thinking involved. Amazing that Russell wrote this before Bohm! I would love to see/hear you discuss this work. I think we are all telepathic, it just takes some training and ethical purification. People don't believe they can, so they don't try.
Everybody wants to believe, In THEIR story, THEIR reason for BEing… That THEY are special. That’s the frustrating thing about ALL of these kinds of spiritual/mystical/metaphysical attempts to explain ANYTHING… (That Mom, would NEVER admit to herself, that she was guiding her kid’s head…these people BUY into their delusion, lie, or “desired story,” whole-heartedly. The need to feel special or NOT-guilty is THAY strong in people.) It’s always a “special” person, Or someone who KNOWS a “special person,” Or someone who wants to BECOME A special person… It’s never anybody acting TRULY objectively, looking to find TRUTH, And…not even interjecting their EGO.🤦♂️ That’s why you DEFINITELY need controls. 🤣
I'm relieved to see your skepticism, as I also see belief as the impetus around this series. Specifically the beliefs of Ky Dickens. Watching initially, I also was immediately hooked into the theme of watching telepathy demonstrated. I didn't catch the board being taken away at the correct moment, but I did begin suspicion at the popsickle sticks. That entire excercise made little sense in terms of demonstration of telepathy. The direction was far too obvious, and the reason given for the 'necessary' touch doesn't hold as valid to me. What clinched it for me though was the purported 'first communication' with the phrase "God gives good gifts". As Anastasia says, that sounds very much like what a mother would say about her child. This completely altered my perception of what I was watching. The Hill discussion - how non-verbal all meet and take turns speaking - that just opens a plethora of questions with no rational answers and sounds far too much like X-Men for sure. I'd still like to see you two interview Ky Dickens.
I love how quickly you debunked the telepathy tapes after looking at the PAID VIDEO of the telepathy sessions. The naming of and monetization scheme behind the telepathy tapes screams premeditated grift. Of course it would be so amazing if telepathy was real but we need to demand better scientific rigor before so much human attention and optimism gets redirected.
I believe in telepathy, but I do not believe there is any good evidence from it in these TT videos. We have already known there is unconscious cueing in FC for a long time. Look at FCisnotscience. A facilitator goes from believer to non-believer and even shows the cueing. It’s not a conscious ploy. It’s a tango between the facilitator and the subject developed over hundreds of hours of practice. Every study ever done on this has shown that the subject cannot spell anything without help. An authorship experiment would be trivially easy, yet one has never succeeded.
I had the same disappointment after seeing some of the footage on another channel. I'm open to it and only one of these needs to be real to be groundbreaking, but the format is the issue for me. I don't think an audio podcast and edited down documentary is appropriate. Present the evidence with as much clarity as possible if your goal is to convince people. Now to take the other side, I don't think you fully debunked the letter/number board pointing as a Clever Hans. I agree that it's not a good way to do the experiment, but the cues would have to be more sophisticated than what you described. The girl with the letters isn't searching through very many before pausing on one and actually does seem to stop before it's pulled away. We do the same thing of scanning over possible solutions before narrowing in on one. But it's definitely questionable, if she has the whole word then she should be able to spell it out straight away, depending on her spelling proficiency I guess. With John Paul and the number board, he goes so fast between the 0 and 1 that it seems hard to be cued. The difficulty with setting up a rigorous experiment setting will be that it requires both the savant and the caretaker, and the experiment has to already be fairly familiar to the savant and shouldn't agitate them. And since autistic savants can have real superpowers of perception and calculation, they could be extremely good at picking up unconscious cues. The hypothesis is interesting, since it's really just taking those verified superpowers one step further.
Minute 23 tape: completely unfair criticism. It is very clear that the child systematically searches for a letter and stops when she finds it. Then the mom removed the board. Very fast, yeah, but you can easily tell that the child isn’t “randomly drifting her hand through the board”. Idk why she removes the board but there could be good reason. Or not. But in any case, there is a clear initiative by the child, who is absolutely not moving randomly. Al this said, of course, not rigorous enough for a scientific experiment. But very good observation. Which sometimes it’s all you get for science. That should also be acknowledged (everything that happens outside of earth for instance).
And the reason why I bring up the fact that sometimes observations is all we have is: Some subjects (cosmology, UFOs, historical stuff etc) are only studied through the limited observations we have. You can’t experiment with them. So you have to be very very rigorous with what you have in order to come up with the most plausible explanation(s). You can’t just say it’s not science because you haven’t run experiments. Well you can, but it doesn’t mean much. Obviously these aren’t scientific experiments. So, I wish you would have rigorously looked at the tapes instead of defaulting to: if there’s a tiny suspicion, then it’s not valid.
The Telepathy Tapes is not a podcast of reports of scientific experiments. For this there is the Ganzfeld experiment (see IONS, for example), Rupert Sheldrake's experiments, etc. Your discussion raises suspicions instead of proposing scientific research that confirms the phenomenon. It's useless speculative talk. If I were one of the children's parents listening to you, I would either be discouraged or angry with you, because you were speculating without having any data to support it. From there only facts can be inferred. No interpretations. That's up to scientists. You were also questioning the work of Dean Radin and IONS without knowing him. Otherwise they wouldn't talk like that. Your conversation seems useless and not very well-intentioned to me.
DEMYSTICON 2025 ANNUAL MEETING IN PORTUGAL!!! June 12-16:
demystifysci.com/demysticon-2025
Listen on the go at all podcast locations: anchor.fm/demystifysci
Material solutions to quantum spookiness: www.youtube.com/@MaterialAtomics
Short films @DemystifySciInvestigates: ua-cam.com/channels/UfzVdgNu2xLThgM2qQZmSQ.html
Well here's the thing guys. Dianne Powell has been pretty explicit that these are not rigorous laboratory experiments and that she hopes that the podcast will help generate the funding for more standardized experiments.
But regardless, the fact of the matter is that the VAST majority of human beliefs are not established by rigorously controlled laboratory experiments. We form beliefs by looking at the world, observing patterns, and making adjustments as needed - and that is not a limitation or a bug. The beliefs that matter to us are the ones that are actually relevant to our lives and lived experiences, and laboratory experiments are part of lived experiments for a veeeeeery tiny percentage of human beings.
Another thing worth mentioning here is the way in which experimental methodologies implicitly endorse reductionistic assumptions. The idea is that you try to isolate as many variables as you possibly can, eo as to **isolate** a mechanistic causal connection between input and output conditions.
This is very effective for certain purposes, but, if we take this to be a universal epistemic standard, then it necessarily presumes a world in which wholes are NOT more than the sum of their parts. The reality is that we live in a world of complex, living systems, and for that reason it is necessarily the case that not all real phenomena are going to be demonstrable under laboratory conditions, wnd that includes many phenomena which we simply take for granted in our daily lives.
Not commenting on the other things you wrote but ask AI for studies done on facilitated communication relating to telepathy/ shared consciousness. The AI can pull so so many studies and they all point in the same direction, hypothesis busted. Dianne Powell and her said to be skeptic DP definitely made a really interesting podcast. Beyond that there isn’t much to the story to all of our dismay.
I’m not sure if the studies were done to anyone’s satisfaction but at least some must be more rigorous than trusting moms in hardship right? Heart goes out to the families of course.
Read some studies and make a video on if they are worth while. I’d love to see it. There are PLENTY of studies to choose from. Throw a dart in the ocean you’ll hit water.
The mom/child connection is so amazing! My eldest son had a horrific skateboarding accident while I was in Spain, and I knew it immediately. I knew what part of his body, and was fairly hysterical until I could get in touch. Moms still have stem cells from their children in their brains!
This is a great topic for discussion. The telepathy experiments with the autistic children were a far cry from Dean Radin’s work and I agree that they were very poor science.
I also agree with the spirit in which you critcised the videos. It’s hard to be overly critical of the parents involved. The same cannot be said of the researchers. There is undoubtedly a lot of wishful thinking going on with the parents and it’s not hard for me to imagine apologies on their behalf.
But the connection you made to better known scientific endeavours is entirely valid, in my opinion. Who knows what tricks could be deployed in data manipulation or modelling to coax the right results out of experiments? It goes without saying that they would be considerably more sophisticated than the contributions of the parents in the Telepathy Tapes.
This also relates to your conversation with Martin Lopez where he pointed out that the big money investments in science are hardly exploratory at all. We invest where we expect to find results that confirm ideas we already hold. In that case, how much pressure was there on researchers at the LHC to find the Higgs Boson? Or on those at LIGO to detect black holes colliding? In other words, how trustworthy are those outcomes given the billions of dollars’ worth of wishful thinking behind the projects?
Pierre-Marie Robitaille has already laid bare the manipulation of CMB data that led to the Cosmic Anisotropy Map and many people are aware that “first image of a black hole” came from data processed according to a model of what was expected. Personally, I’m extremely sceptical of these ideas.
My experience of working in research suggests that there is both grift and wishful thinking. If I were to make a sweeping generalisation, I’d say that it probably depends on the ambition of the people involved. Absent any high ambitions for a Nobel Prize or well-paid tenure, it’s just about possible to carve out a research career by living from grant to grant that you obtain through being able to make a good pitch.
However, I’d say that wishful thinking plays a much larger part. Being right is pretty important to most people but it reaches an existential level for a scientist. How can you have any authority or social standing as a scientist if you are wrong? When a scientist is defending their ideas they are fighting for the survival of their reputation, their self-esteem, their being. Who wouldn’t fight dirty with such high stakes?
The Telepathy Tapes is important because it is shown that there is strange phenomenon going on, and it brings brings the topic to the popular audience. This should elicit more rigorous experimentation, but it is how science evolves; someone sees an anomaly, and they look closer. If the strangeness persists, further testing is needed.
Completely agree with Anastasia’s criticism about scientists and their emotions. Sometimes we are fooled by people who look unemotional.
The intelligence-income formula breaks down at the highest point, where the wealthiest among us are most often average in intelligence.
I think that the high salaries in tech come from the FOMO of the wealthiest business people. There is a history of promising tech attracting colossal investment. Sometimes that has paid off, sometimes not. But for wealthy investors you have to be in it to win it.
Ok episode 1’s criticism (mom holding kid’s head): totally fair criticism if we are talking about scientific rigor. It’s not rigorous enough. NOW, if you actually pay attention to the precision, it is hard to argue that the child doesn’t have some ability. Plus, it is not entirely clear that the mom is actually leading the movement of the child’s head. The child might be leading the movement
I think we need to remember to apply Peirce's pragmatic principle - consider what it would imply about the world if we took the proposition seriously that the autistic kids are being coached or manipulated in order to deceive the researchers, or that the researchers are acting deceptively. Not trusting the data in these studies is not the same as not trusting it in cases of honest fallibility - great care would have to be taken to hide this personal deception, and I see no sign whatsoever of this.
Thank you for this video! I watched an interview about the telepathy tapes and knew something was not right, I just did not know what it was. I appreciate your dedication to showing the mechanisms behind the magic tricks!
Dangerous slippery slope lubricated by wishful thinking and focused ignorance. Never underestimate the power of despair.
32:31 there is an error rate mentioned in the first few episodes, but it was pretty low, like 2 percent or something.
24:53 it doesnt look like she is wandering around the board, it looks like her hand is going in a direct line over the intermediate letters towards the correct letter. to me at least
Damn, I wanna believe. Thanks for diving into this, you both navigated the subject beautifully.
The M.D. involved knows it doesn’t meet scientific rigor and I heard has obtained some funding to do research at UVA possibly in faraday cage etc. Let’s hope in a few years there will be more reliable findings!
You 2 should get Daniel Tammet on and test his abilities
24:30 - watch the section with 0,25x speed - I think you can clearly detect that the mother only moves the the board away once the test subjects "taps" on a specific letter. You can also see that the girl generally moves into the right direction almost immediatly once the board is placed. I think that in this particular experiment, fascilitated communication is not the best explanation for what we see. But then again, I agree with your skepticism because some of the other experiments are highly flawed in their methodology.
Same with the boy, his fingers seem to me to be in the right spot as soon as he starts moving it towards the board, his obvious lack of dexterity probably led to some errors and is making it hard to decide. It would be easy to make a test that doesn't involve the parents at all, or at least doesn't involve them controlling the board.
@@isma3il2005 Yeah I completely agree! The only thing that keeps a sour aftertaste is that there are just so many painfully obvious things you could have controlled for accurately - but that did not happen. If this is a real thing, then it should be reproduceable even under strict conditions - I will remain agnostic until then.
Why touch the head, this is way too weird.
You guys are not being “dicks”. Your honesty is appreciated and very important.
At the same time a podcast that i follow had the director of the " telepathy tapes" as a guest, Jessie Michaels released a 2 hour video about it.
That was enough of a red flag for me to skip it.
Now that i see the videos I'm even more confused , why this even required so much exposure.
I hope funds acquired through the sales go straight to the kids that need them.
Can you explain why Jesse Michels is a red flag to you? (honest question)
@shauncy7 not Jessie per se but both videos popped in my feed on the same day in the same hour.
And the podcast is in UK.
So there is some release schedule for maximum impact,so i got suspicious.
Maybe i wasn't clear enough in the previous post,I hope that clears things out.
@@alphadog6970 it does, thank you :)
One of the reasons that telepathy and psychic communication is probably impossible to study in a lab is that these types of communications, in my experience, have to do with meaning and necessity, they are not mechanical and reproducible.
I've always wondered where belief ends and evidence begins. Can you have evidence without belief? I feel like sometimes we like to pretend that we don't choose our versions of evidence, as if the roadblock that stops us from believing in anything isn't ultimately ourselves and we push the responsibility on to others to somehow force us to change our chosen beliefs. If you wish to believe something than no one could stop you except you.
From Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris:
Wherefore the Egyptians think that little children possess the power of prophecy, and they try to divine the future from the portents which they find in children's words, especially when children are playing about in holy places and crying out whatever chances to come into their minds.
There is a long tradition of using children for accessing the field, in many societies.
I kinda believe it.
I'll feel like I'm being watched, and within 5 seconds receive a reply on twitter.
Or I'll think of my brother or mother and get a message or call from them within 5 seconds.
It might just be good timing... but its happened so many times that I feel something is there.
Kinda like a 6th sense that some people might be more intuned to feeling....
Hilarious that you fact-checked a story about Facebook going down the tubes.
24:53 if we could see tha numbers on the tablet, that could clarify why the mom is retracting the board when she does. She could be retracting it after the mom see that the child has put an input on the tablet. But the tablet is too bright to see.
You can see Frank Zappa as an early autistic, or at least with Asperger´s Syndrome. What happens when there are many small ischemia, due to insult to the system. These can interfere with sense processing.. Often, the individual will develop one sense of ability due to the fact that other senses are not functioning properly. Like Stevie Wonder´s musical ability, perhaps due to his limited vision. Autistics have less access to human emotion and connection, but often are good at mathematical pursuits. They may be early experiments in trans humanism.
There are many ways of accessing information. I have been naturally psychic all my life. My son who has Down´s Syndrome has taught me even more about non verbal communication, extending to other life forms.
I recently discovered the work of Walter Russell, `The Secret of Light´. I'm mostly self taught in science, but I love the careful thinking involved. Amazing that Russell wrote this before Bohm! I would love to see/hear you discuss this work.
I think we are all telepathic, it just takes some training and ethical purification. People don't believe they can, so they don't try.
Everybody wants to believe,
In THEIR story,
THEIR reason for BEing…
That THEY are special.
That’s the frustrating thing about ALL of these kinds of spiritual/mystical/metaphysical attempts to explain ANYTHING…
(That Mom, would NEVER admit to herself, that she was guiding her kid’s head…these people BUY into their delusion, lie, or “desired story,” whole-heartedly. The need to feel special or NOT-guilty is THAY strong in people.)
It’s always a “special” person,
Or someone who KNOWS a
“special person,”
Or someone who wants to BECOME
A special person…
It’s never anybody acting TRULY objectively, looking to find TRUTH,
And…not even interjecting their EGO.🤦♂️
That’s why you DEFINITELY need controls. 🤣
I'm relieved to see your skepticism, as I also see belief as the impetus around this series. Specifically the beliefs of Ky Dickens.
Watching initially, I also was immediately hooked into the theme of watching telepathy demonstrated. I didn't catch the board being taken away at the correct moment, but I did begin suspicion at the popsickle sticks. That entire excercise made little sense in terms of demonstration of telepathy. The direction was far too obvious, and the reason given for the 'necessary' touch doesn't hold as valid to me. What clinched it for me though was the purported 'first communication' with the phrase "God gives good gifts". As Anastasia says, that sounds very much like what a mother would say about her child. This completely altered my perception of what I was watching. The Hill discussion - how non-verbal all meet and take turns speaking - that just opens a plethora of questions with no rational answers and sounds far too much like X-Men for sure. I'd still like to see you two interview Ky Dickens.
I love how quickly you debunked the telepathy tapes after looking at the PAID VIDEO of the telepathy sessions. The naming of and monetization scheme behind the telepathy tapes screams premeditated grift.
Of course it would be so amazing if telepathy was real but we need to demand better scientific rigor before so much human attention and optimism gets redirected.
How is that a debunking of anything?
Maybe begin practicing it before you demand more research. As that is the best way to Know and wait for science to catch up! ❤
The attention and optimism is what will elicit the rigor.
I believe in telepathy, but I do not believe there is any good evidence from it in these TT videos. We have already known there is unconscious cueing in FC for a long time. Look at FCisnotscience. A facilitator goes from believer to non-believer and even shows the cueing. It’s not a conscious ploy. It’s a tango between the facilitator and the subject developed over hundreds of hours of practice. Every study ever done on this has shown that the subject cannot spell anything without help. An authorship experiment would be trivially easy, yet one has never succeeded.
Energy. Aura. Not in English.
I had the same disappointment after seeing some of the footage on another channel. I'm open to it and only one of these needs to be real to be groundbreaking, but the format is the issue for me. I don't think an audio podcast and edited down documentary is appropriate. Present the evidence with as much clarity as possible if your goal is to convince people.
Now to take the other side, I don't think you fully debunked the letter/number board pointing as a Clever Hans. I agree that it's not a good way to do the experiment, but the cues would have to be more sophisticated than what you described.
The girl with the letters isn't searching through very many before pausing on one and actually does seem to stop before it's pulled away. We do the same thing of scanning over possible solutions before narrowing in on one. But it's definitely questionable, if she has the whole word then she should be able to spell it out straight away, depending on her spelling proficiency I guess. With John Paul and the number board, he goes so fast between the 0 and 1 that it seems hard to be cued.
The difficulty with setting up a rigorous experiment setting will be that it requires both the savant and the caretaker, and the experiment has to already be fairly familiar to the savant and shouldn't agitate them. And since autistic savants can have real superpowers of perception and calculation, they could be extremely good at picking up unconscious cues. The hypothesis is interesting, since it's really just taking those verified superpowers one step further.
Minute 23 tape: completely unfair criticism. It is very clear that the child systematically searches for a letter and stops when she finds it. Then the mom removed the board. Very fast, yeah, but you can easily tell that the child isn’t “randomly drifting her hand through the board”. Idk why she removes the board but there could be good reason. Or not. But in any case, there is a clear initiative by the child, who is absolutely not moving randomly. Al this said, of course, not rigorous enough for a scientific experiment. But very good observation. Which sometimes it’s all you get for science. That should also be acknowledged (everything that happens outside of earth for instance).
And the reason why I bring up the fact that sometimes observations is all we have is:
Some subjects (cosmology, UFOs, historical stuff etc) are only studied through the limited observations we have. You can’t experiment with them. So you have to be very very rigorous with what you have in order to come up with the most plausible explanation(s). You can’t just say it’s not science because you haven’t run experiments. Well you can, but it doesn’t mean much. Obviously these aren’t scientific experiments. So, I wish you would have rigorously looked at the tapes instead of defaulting to: if there’s a tiny suspicion, then it’s not valid.
The Telepathy Tapes is not a podcast of reports of scientific experiments. For this there is the Ganzfeld experiment (see IONS, for example), Rupert Sheldrake's experiments, etc. Your discussion raises suspicions instead of proposing scientific research that confirms the phenomenon. It's useless speculative talk. If I were one of the children's parents listening to you, I would either be discouraged or angry with you, because you were speculating without having any data to support it. From there only facts can be inferred. No interpretations. That's up to scientists. You were also questioning the work of Dean Radin and IONS without knowing him. Otherwise they wouldn't talk like that. Your conversation seems useless and not very well-intentioned to me.