Can psychics really see the past/future?

[J'aran]

Originally posted by Iron Greasel: Well, if I could see the future, I'd get rich by lottery, not tell some poor idiot his fate for $5. Therefore all psychics that you see are either a) fakes trying to take your money, b) complete morons not wanting the money or c) on a mission from God who has told them to not get rich. I'd say most are type a).

Heh, it's not like a genuine psychic would see such details as winning lottery numbers you know. The way I understand it, it's supposed to be more like getting vague-ish hints to coming occurences.

But I still agree with you that most any fortune-teller you will encounter is a type a). [img]smile.gif[/img]

[ 09-30-2004, 09:18 AM: Message edited by: J'aran ]

[Larry_OHF]

http://www.skepdic.com/psychdet.html

psychic detectives


Psychic detectives (PDs) are alleged psychics who offer to help law enforcement agencies solve crimes.

In their book, The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime, Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi list many reasons people without any psychic powers gain a reputation for assisting in the detection of crime. In many cases, most of the evidence in favor of the psychic detective is provided to the mass media by the psychic rather than by an independent source. The mass media are rarely critical or skeptical of the claims of psychics. For example, alleged psychic detective Sylvia Browne has declared many times that she has used her psychic powers to solve crimes, yet it is rare to see her challenged as she was by Brill's Content.

Brill's Content has examined ten recent Montel Williams programs that highlighted Browne's work as a psychic detective (as opposed to her ideas about "the afterlife," for example), spanning 35 cases. In 21, the details were too vague to be verified. Of the remaining 14, law-enforcement officials or family members involved in the investigations say that Browne had played no useful role.

"These guys don't solve cases, and the media consistently gets it wrong," says Michael Corn, an investigative producer for "Inside Edition" who produced a story last May debunking psychic detectives. Moreover, the FBI and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children maintain that to their knowledge, psychic detectives have never helped solve a single missing-person case.

"Zero. They go on TV and I see how things go and what they claim but no, zero," says FBI agent Chris Whitcomb. "They may be remarkable in other ways, but the FBI does not use them" ("Prophet Motive," Brill's Content, November 27, 2000).

Browne has made many claims on the "Larry King Show" about her great crime-solving powers, including the claim that she solved the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. James Randi challenged another of Browne's claims, made on "Larry King," to be working with Stephen Xanthos of the Rumson, New Jersey, police department. She said she was getting ready to close a case.

….no person named Xanthos ever worked with that police department, though there was a Stephen Xanthos who was canned from another New Jersey police department. Looking a little further into this mythical claim of Sylvia's, we discovered that Xanthos had a private investigator's license at one time, but it expired in 1994. It's interesting to note that if this man really had been working with Browne, as she stated he was on the Larry King show, he would be subject to charges of a third degree felony, under New Jersey State law - that's on a par with burglary and car theft. Not that we ever believed Sylvia was telling the truth, but she should be a bit more clever with her mendacity (Randi).

There are other reasons for the undeserved reputations of psychic detectives besides blowing their own horns to an uncritical media. They do sometimes guess correctly. Everybody can have a 50% hit rate if we guess "dead" or "alive" about a missing person. The odds are good that by the time a psychic gets involved in a missing person case, the person is probably dead. The events predicted by PDs are commonplace events which are predicted by thousands of psychics every year. (A missing person will be either dead or alive; if dead probably buried; if buried probably in a remote place such as the woods. Shallow graves are likely to be pretty common, too. How many killers take the time to dig a deep grave? Yet, predicting that a body will be found in a shallow grave in a wooded area is taken by some to be truly astounding if it turns out to be the case.) In other words, some PDs' "visions" are bound to be "correct" often enough for the credulous to be duped. What seems like an accurate perception is due to its vagueness, commonness, and the latitude available as to what will count as a psychic hit. E.g., "I see water near the body;" "I see trees." Some PDs are very skilful in their use of vagueness and ambiguity, and provide "the verbal equivalent of a Rorschach test," according to Piet Hein Hoebens, one of Truzzi's collaborators in a "Psychic Sleuths" project.

Lyons and Truzzi note that, over time, reports of psychic achievements get exaggerated and distorted. Vague claims become specific. Errors become replaced with correct predictions. Events that never happened become "facts." Often, the PD herself or himself is the source of this historical reconstructionism. Sometimes a psychic's "predictions" are made after an event, but claimed to have been made before it, like Sylvia Browne's claim after the September 11th terrorist attacks that she had predicted it.

Some of the undeserved reputation of PDs comes from their clients: the police or relatives of crime victims. The clients count misses and errors as hits. For example, Browne told a woman her husband died of a "clot" and, even though he died of a hemorrhage, the client agreed that Brown was right, even though the difference between the two is like the difference between a plugged drain and a burst pipe.

Clients often take coincidences for hits. Sometimes, as Lyons and Truzzi point out, the information provided by the PD was garnered from another source, often from an unwitting law enforcement agent. The psychic just feeds back information initially provided by the client himself. Some psychic successes are merely self-fulfilling prophecies. Clients find ways to retrofit facts with the vague and ambiguous pronouncements of the psychic. Clients also often use selective thinking, remembering what seems accurate and forgetting what was clearly not on the mark. Furthermore, the mass media publish stories about alleged psychic successes, while generally ignoring stories about psychic failures and frauds. Reputations are thereby created and enhanced from trivial or paltry evidence of psychic detective powers.

According to Lyons and Truzzi, PDs often use shotgunning to providing information, i.e., they provide a large quantity of information, some of which is bound to fit the case. Shotgunning relies on confirmation bias and cold reading, the Forer effect and Barnum-type statements: the cop tunes in to the info that is correct and ignores what isn't and unknowingly gives cues to the psychic as he or she fires salvo after salvo.

Some PDs are simply frauds, according to Lyons and Truzzi. Some psychics even use accomplices to accomplish their frauds and deceptions. Some bribe informants, including police officers, for information they pass off as acquired by psychic means.

While it is true that some cops believe in psychics, many simply use them for their own purposes. Lyons and Truzzi tell the story of a cop who considered psychic Noreen Reiner's drawing of a circle to be a correct clue in a crime because the person arrested drove a cement mixer. Another cop considered Dorothy Allison's clues in a case to be on the money even though she predicted a missing person was dead who was not dead but was living in a religious cult community. The cop admitted he was baffled by Allison's error about the person being dead but which way was he dead? asked the cop, "Biologically? Clinically? Dead tired?" However, such wishful thinking and self-deception seem to be the exception rather than the rule among law enforcement officers. Cops are more likely to use psychics to cover up their real sources of information, to protect an informant, or to conceal the fact that information was obtained illegally. Finally, some cops use psychics, or even pretend to be psychic, to psych out superstitious suspects.

Lyons and Truzzi also note that many PDs simply use their intelligence, reason inductively and deductively, play hunches, examine evidence, make careful observations, listen attentively, consider alternatives, follow their intuition, etc., just like "real" cops do. In some cases, the PDs have more experience with certain types of crimes than the cops they work with.

Despite the very strong evidence that most psychic detectives are deluded or frauds, Lyons and Truzzi divide the world of psychics into psychics and pseudo-psychics. Pseudo-psychics are divided into authentic (those who are not aware that they are using tricks or ordinary means of perception, information gathering, reasoning, etc.) and unauthentic (the outright frauds). To support their notion that at least some of the PDs may truly be psychic, Lyons and Truzzi note that

Some people have an unusually acute sense of vision, hearing, or smell, what psychologists call hyperesthesia. A recent example was a New Jersey doctor [Arthur G. Lintgen] who was able to examine an unlabeled classical recording and ascertain the music and sometimes even the conductor just by looking at the grooves.

The authors take such an ability as evidence of some extraordinary power (vinyl vision), but Dr. Lintgen has a different explanation: The trick is to examine the physical construction of the recording and look at the relative playing time of each one of the movements or separations on the recording (Seckel).

Dr. Lintgen also used other quite ordinary inductive and deductive powers to identify such arcane bits of information as the nationality of the orchestra. One thing he didn't do, however, was deceive himself or others regarding his talent, a bit of honesty seemingly lost on many of today's self-proclaimed psychics.

See related entries on clairvoyance, Jeane Dixon, Uri Geller, psychics, and James Van Praagh.

further reading

reader comments

How Psychic Sleuths Waste Police Resources by Joe Nickell
"Psychics" exploiting missing children from the Klass Kids Foundation
Articles on Florida "psychic detective" Noreen Renier by Gary P. Posner
The Man Who Could Read Record Grooves by Al Seckel, Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1987
Hicks, Robert D. In Pursuit of Satan: the Police and the Occult (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991).

Lyons, Arthur and Marcello Truzzi, The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime, New York: The Mysterious Press, 1991).

Nickell, Joe. ed. Psychic sleuths: ESP and sensational cases (Buffalo, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1994).

Rawcliffe, Donovan Hilton, Illusions and Delusions of the Supernatural and the Occult; the Psychology of the Occult (New York: Dover Publications, 1959).

Steiner, Robert A. "Fortunetelling," in The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal edited by Gordon Stein (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996) pp. 281-290.

Wiseman, Richard et al., "Psychic Crime Detectives: A New Test for Measuring Their Successes and Failures," Skeptical Inquirer, Jan/Feb. 1996.

[Bungleau]

Hmmm... Dundee, were you the one who slammed the other thread down to the ground?

*edit* and to add something to the discussion, I have relatives who claim to be psychic. There may be something to it, but it is a very vague and nebulous thing. I do believe that all independent scientific tests to prove psychic ability have failed miserably...

[ 09-30-2004, 10:22 AM: Message edited by: Bungleau ]

[Jonas Strider]

save your money and do your own psychic stuff. no need to give your money away when all you need to do is listen to your own self and you'll do fine. however, there are truly gifted ones out there and those rarely need to advertise for your business. they will stay out of the limelight for the most part. also, yes i do believe pyschic abilities are real. how else would anyone survive without it. you use it everyday.

[Gangrell]

What are you all talking about? I trust Miss Cleo

There are people with some psychic intuition but maybe not on the level of seeing into the past or the future. Usually very perceptive people can see what will happen, but I think there are the few that have a higher sense. John Edward I guess you can take for example of that.

[Grojlach]

Originally posted by Gangrell: Usually very perceptive people can see what will happen, but I think there are the few that have a higher sense. John Edward I guess you can take for example of that.

What, you mean John "biggest douche in the Universe" Edward?

[Aelia Jusa]

Originally posted by Grojlach: I don't think there are any. The fact that you've heard of "psychics" solving a case or making a good prediction is more the result of coincidences and luck than anything substantial - for every "good" prediction, there are many predictions by the very same person that were dead wrong, though which we won't ever hear about. There are known cases however in which criminal investigations only took a turn for the worse because the police put too much trust in the word of psychics - having them chase cold trails and waste time, while the real perpetrator simply continued on his killing sprees for a while longer. I'd say they do more harm than good, leeching on gullible souls looking for some strain of hope, only to be severly disappointed in the longer run; and any person claiming to see into the future is in my opinion either a fraud out to make a quick buck or just plain nuts. And if you want to see some different views on the subject other than some tv show that could manipulate facts in such a way that psychics had anything to do with the respective happy endings, try to catch the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode on psychics and Nostradamus.

While I agree with a lot of what you've said, I don't tend to buy into the 'if they were psychic, they'd always be right in their predictions' argument. If you can do something, it doesn't mean you'll always be able to do it perfectly. A high jumper may have the world record for a jump, but they don't jump that height every single time they jump; in fact, they may only do it once. But they still are capable of jumping that height. Of course, not the perfect analogy, but I'm sure the point is clear. I do agree, though, that because there are so many shonksters and frauds, that it is, at the very least, a waste of resources to have psychics involved in police investigations.

I find John Edward's show sort of weird. He spends most of the time showing off that he knows (however that may be, most likely he has staff casing the audience's houses and employs all those little tricks to get people to tell him when he's on the scent) all about the person's relative, rather than saying anything meaningful to the person about what their relative wants to let them know. It's always a 'Uncle Jimbo says to be strong' or something tacked onto the end as an afterthought

[Grojlach]

On the subject of John Edwards, he's merely applying the cheap tactic of "cold reading"; while the South Park episode in which John Edward was rewarded with the "biggest douche in the universe award" ( ) already demonstrated how cheap and easy it really is, the malignancy of all this gets clearer upon watching the first episode of the first season of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! show. Highly recommended.

[ 09-30-2004, 04:44 PM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]

[Grojlach]

Originally posted by Aelia Jusa: While I agree with a lot of what you've said, I don't tend to buy into the 'if they were psychic, they'd always be right in their predictions' argument.

Nor am I claiming that, you're turning it the other way around now. But if I make a thousand predictions right now, chances are that at least one of 'em will prove to be correct in the longer run; that still doesn't make me psychic, though.
It's the "if you put enough monkeys behind typewriters and have them hit random keys, eventually you're bound to get one of them to type an entire Shakespeare play" story here; one could be correct purely by coincidence.

[ 09-30-2004, 04:53 PM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]

[Dron_Cah]

Well, I dont know anything about psychics, but I think physicists are more likely to solve the crimes.