Do paranormal abilities exist? | Decoded

Telepathy, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, precognition. Parapsychology enthusiasts claim that these are all human capabilities. Is this true? If it is, then who has an interest to use it? Or to stop us from using it? I've always had the will to test my limits. Training helps me be fit. Studying, understanding better, it's logical. But I've also experienced things beyond logic. In theatre, the whole troupe does a warm-up before every performance or rehearsal. We had to stand in a circle, feel each other and jump together, and land on the ground in the same instant, without preparing, just feeling. When this worked, it was like magic, as if we all had psychic powers. There are people out there who claim that they have these amazing abilities, claiming that they can actually heal people. The status quo does not want people having these abilities. Our mind is not only the five senses and reason, there is more. Some people claim that human beings have superpowers, and they say there are governments studying this subject and conducting secret research in a bid to understand it, and possibly to control it. Could this be true? In my research, I found that interest in psychic phenomena started in the 19th century, and peaked in the Cold War era, and in the 70s. Governments and universities started funding experiments on psychic phenomena. Someone like Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths University of London, can tell me about what they found. Hi Chris, how are you doing? Fine, thanks. What is parapsychology? Parapsychology is the scientific study of phenomena which fall outside of conventional science. So in particular, parapsychologists tend to focus on extrasensory perception, ESP, and that comes in three different varieties. One is telepathy, the alleged ability for direct mind-to-mind contact. Secondly, precognition, knowing about future events before they happen. And thirdly, clairvoyance, picking up information from remote locations without using the known sensory channels. Abilities which mainstream science as yet does not recognize. In history, there has been numerous swindles in the name of parapsychology. I mean, it is a huge business. Absolutely. One of the reasons that I am interested in these kinds of issues is from, if you like, a consumer protection point of view. Because, obviously, there are people out there who claim that they have these amazing abilities. In my view, even more dangerously, claiming that they can actually heal people, they have amazing powers of healing. Now they're charging for those services, not always, but often they are charging for those services. Can you remember any of these swindles? Back in the 1980s, there was a chap called Peter Popoff, the Reverend Peter Popoff, who was a fundamentalist preacher who claimed that he could cure members of his congregation. He made lots and lots and lots of money out of this. And it was noticed by a very famous skeptic who sadly died recently, James Randi, that he went on to one of his shows and realized that Popoff wore a hearing aid. Long story short, Randi got a friend of his who was an electronics expert to come in. They figured out what frequency was being used, and they recorded Popoff's wife passing this information to him, which he was then using to fool his audience. Bravo. Very nice. How did you do that? A bent spoon and half another spoon. I put it like this and add this one like that. And then I go like, oh, done. A trick. Yes, but I have actually seen videos of people who can really do that. Are you silly? I am telling you it is just a trick and I'm showing you how to do it. Why can't they both be right? There are people who have supernatural powers and others copy them using tricks just like yourself. Where are those people who have supernatural powers? In all the ones we hear about, there isn't any scientific evidence of their supernatural power. Did you know that they once did an experiment and asked the participants to assess two scientific reports? They asked a group to assess a report with the title telepathy in psychology and asked the second group to assess a report with the title a study in neuroscience. The participants assessed the report on neuroscience as more scientific, more believable and more trustworthy in comparison to the report on telepathy. It's normal. What's the problem? Both reports were identical and the only thing different was the title. I'm just telling you. That's all. Parapsychology research is not secret anymore. Now the CIA has admitted that they trained agents to seek impressions of distant targets. They call it remote viewing. When an Iranian student group in 1979 took over the US embassy in Tehran and seized hostages, the CIA used psychic spies to peek inside the building. A downed Soviet bomber was located in a Congo jungle, thanks to remote viewers. Peter Herkos assisted in the investigation in 1961 of the serial killer, the Boston Strangler. Neela Jones helped to catch the Yorkshire Ripper who murdered 13 people in England in the late 1970s. Remote viewers were also used in cases of disappearances such as that of Millie Dowler in 2002 in Ireland and Madeleine McCann in 2007 in Portugal. Definitely this is more than just a spoon trick. Is it a trick or isn't it? Or is it that the real trick is to not believe it and call it a trick? There is an interesting theory about why we do not believe in parapsychology or use it. Dean Braddon, president of the Parapsychological Association, can give me more information on this theory. Hi Dean, how are you? Hello. In which areas do they use parapsychology today? There are many, many groups and teachers around the world who are using remote viewing, teaching it and using it. Many of the applications are about financial investments. So it is remote viewing things that will influence the stock market or other kinds of investments or finding minerals or oil. So for cold cases, especially like murder cases that have not been solved, for missing persons and usually for cases that get stalled because there's not enough information. That's where some law enforcement agencies will go to remote viewers. Could you tell me how much is the psychic industry worth in the States? In terms of entertainment, the psychic industry around the world is worth billions of dollars. An estimate was once made that the total amount of money spent on parapsychology since the beginning, since the 1800s to now, is approximately the same as what is spent in conventional academia around the world for their psychology classes in one month. In one month? So that raises your question. Why is it not being studied? Well, so one reason is religious prohibitions. Lots of religions say that this kind of thing is declared to be demonic. Then there's scientific pressure. Science today is built on a set of assumptions and those assumptions make it very difficult to understand why these effects should be true. You also have pressure from the governments because one of the aspects of telepathy, of clairvoyance, all of these psychic phenomena is that you can't hide secrets. You can't hide secrets in your head and you can't hide secrets behind closed doors because a really good psychic can get those secrets. Our institutions, our governments, our entertainment systems all want to maintain the status quo. The status quo does not want people having these abilities. Is it possible that governments prevent us from knowing about superpowers and from using them? An interesting hypothesis for sure, but our belief in it requires that we accept the hypothesis that these supernatural abilities really exist. This brings us back to the first question. Do these capabilities really exist? All my life I have loved science and I see that science holds the answers to most human questions, but unfortunately not all of them. For a very long time scientists have been puzzled as to how migratory birds can know the directions of north and south even in the dark and even when there are no signs. There are many hypotheses including that there is an amount of iron in the nerve cells of birds which is affected by the magnetic field of the earth and works like a compass. But whatever the assumptions are and no matter whether or not we know the reason for this, it still means that birds know and will continue to know the north from the south. Are we like birds? Do we have senses and abilities that science still does not understand? Or is the problem that science hasn't yet advanced enough? It is easy for one to explain a supernatural phenomena as a delusion because it violates what one is accustomed to. In one of the theater exercises I held my breath for as long as possible. The longest I could go was three minutes but one day I heard about someone who held his breath for 24 minutes. I actually couldn't believe it because for me it was a supernatural phenomenon. I researched the subject and found that it is true. A Croatian diver named Bodimir Subat broke the world record for the period of time spent without breathing. And here I knew that there was a difference between supernatural and supernormal. Subat was not supernatural. Subat went beyond the usual I know and nature allows one if trained well to hold one's breath for 24 minutes and maybe more. This difference is what Edsel Cardinia uses to explain the phenomena of parapsychology. Hi Edsel how are you? Hi I'm all right. Do you think that this part of the human capacity has not been scientifically researched enough? Absolutely because I think we as human beings we start and we have all kinds of capabilities but then culture and education from all of this openness start straightening up say this is reality this is how you must think this is who you are and then it gets smaller and smaller and every culture does that in different ways but every culture does that. Psy refers to the scientific study of phenomena that suggest that consciousness or mind is not just bound by the senses and reason. Let me put it in other words that we may be able to know things that we should not know that perhaps all of a sudden you get an intuition oh my grandma just died even though I do not know why I would have that hunch because she's in perfect health and then the following hour you find out that precisely when you have that intuition that's precisely when she died in an accident and that it was unexpected you know the traditional way would say to just disregard those phenomena and say oh that's just coincidence but actually there is a lot of scientific evidence that suggests these are not just coincidences this just shows that again we have greater capabilities and our mind is not only the five senses and reason that there is more. Could you give me a little synopsis of these scientific evidence that's not a coincidence? When a phenomenon like that occurs in everyday life it is impossible to say that it was not a coincidence but then what I and other people do as researchers is that we bring people to the lab and we arrange the context so that you can rule out that it was a coincidence and then we for example might say to the people you're going to go to sleep you're going to have dreams and I would like you to dream about what another person is watching in another room and you do not know what that image is about there is no way that you could know it but we would like you just to have the intention to let your dreams be affected by that image that somebody else is watching in another building and then you end up later asking the person who had the dreams okay we have four different images which one do you think was the one that the person was watching and if people just guess correctly a chance they should guess 25 percent of the time and what we know is that people typically end up guessing considerably more around 34 percent of the time which when you do this dozens or hundreds of times means that it passes the criterion for scientific significance meaning you can say this is not just chance what I did in a recent article was to look at all of the evidence experimental evidence for parapsychology that had been published up to that time 2018 and all of the evidence has looked through statistical analysis showed a support for this phenomenon that they are valid they do occur that it is not just people having you know delusions or just guessing correctly and no that if they happen they are real there are many things that science still does not know how to explain they say knowledge in the world is divided into three parts what we know what we don't know and what is impossible for us to know no matter how hard we try the task of science is to transform what we don't know into what we do but our task is to know the difference between things we don't know and things which are impossible to know do supernatural abilities of humans exist the explanation of which is not known but will it be known one day or is it something metaphysical that science cannot decipher or is it simply a thing that does not exist at all except in our illusions and desires these are questions for which i'm still looking for answers i'm on my journey and i'm also looking for more questions