FAQ Psychic Testing
How can psychics get so much right but not do well on the standard tests for psychic ability? This is a <
difficult and tantalising question. There are many methods that have been employed to ‘test’ psychic ability and probably the best known is the one that uses geometrical shapes. Usually, the test is administered by a researcher who literally ‘holds all the cards’ which may be used as a ‘deck’ i.e., shuffled and re-shuffled before each ‘draw’. However, in some double-blind versions of the test, the cards are placed in envelopes, keeping the researcher as much ‘in the dark’ as the subject who will be inside a sealed room with no view of either the researcher or the cards/envelopes. The subject’s responses are recorded (triangle, square, circle, etc.) and the computer coded envelopes are opened afterward to see how accurate the subject was.
In recent years, computers have also been brought into the research lab using random number type programmes to select the geometric shapes randomly. The researcher might or might not be present in the room with the computer; the subject’s responses are recorded on both audio and video for scoring. No matter how these ‘tests’ are constructed, however, repetition is necessary and sometimes one subject will be ‘tested’ thousands and thousands of times. It is a boring and enervating process for the test subject and many score less well after a certain threshhold of tolerance is reached; subjects begin to become emotionally indifferent to the outcome and stop ‘trying’ to get it right. Unfortunately, this type of repetitious ‘testing’ is still considered essential in order to establish a baseline of psychic ability in each subject.
FAQ Psychic Testing
Another type of testing employs images torn randomly from magazines and sealed into opaque envelopes or flashed on a computer screen for the researcher to view as the psychic in another sealed room tries to ‘see’ and describe or even to draw the images in each envelope or computer screen. This sort of testing is less tedious and many subjects prefer it to the endless round of geometric forms.
The least used but often most productive form of testing from the psychic’s point of view involves real test subjects, people recruited to ‘sit’ for the psychic who attempts to ‘read’ the test subject. The psychic
has no idea who she/he will be reading and neither does the researcher because the test subjects who are being ‘read’ are selected by computer and identified only by a digital signature that is assigned to the ‘sitter’ immediately before the ‘reading’. Furthermore, the ‘sitters’ are not present in the research facility or even in the same country in some cases. The computer contacts the selected ‘sitter’ who may or may not be available at the time. When an available ‘sitter’ is found, the reading will commence with the psychic having absolutely NO INFORMATION of any kind about the ‘sitter’. The entire process is opaque to all of the participants. Hits and misses (accurate and inaccurate) information given by the psychic is recorded and then rated using a weighted method which gives the highest rating only to totally accurate, non-ambiguous responses. This methodology has been refined to an extremely demanding scientific standard by Dr. Gary Schwartz and a team of researchers at the University of Arizona’s Windbridge Institute, formerly named the Veritas project.
My own experience suggests that tests of psychic ability using real people as ‘sitters’ for the psychic to ‘read’ – especially under the incredibly strict controls used by Schwartz to guarantee no contact between ‘sitters’ and either the psychics or the researchers – is the best way to measure psychic ability. Remote viewing of real subjects, locations, or events tells us far more about the sensitivity and accuracy of psychics than an infinite number of tests using only geometric forms. We all have different threshholds for boredom and trying to connect with something that is not conscious and has no emotional content or meaning may reflect not the psychic’s ability but the researcher’s lack of originality in designing scientifically acceptable protocols.
The books cited in this post are available HERE
