Interviews summarizes Alex Tsakiris’s experience investigating psychic mediums, and the skeptical claims made against them.

Join host Alex Tsakiris for a summation of research demonstration of  psychic medium communication.  Tsakiris also discusses his plans for a book exploring why skeptical arguments often stand in contrast to the best available research:

Alex Tsakiris:  One of the questions I get asked a lot is, am I going to write a book based on what I’ve learned while doing Skeptiko.  I’ve always said no, but recently I’ve started to change my mind.  Maybe a book that chronicles my journey thru all the craziness I’ve encountered with Skeptics, Atheists, wacky scientism believers and fundamentalist religious types would be a good idea.  I’ve always approached Skeptiko as my personal journey of discovery, shared with others, but I’ve also come to realize that by sharing these interviews with you I’ve created a feedback loop that is just as much a part of what Skeptiko is about as the shows themselves.  So, I hoping this book, will give you and I a chance to re-examine what we’ve discovered and what it means.

So, here goes… Every book needs a title… here’s mine:  Why Skeptics Are Wrong… About Almost Everything…

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Skeptiko shows on psychics and mediums.

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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and on this episode we’re going to start a new project. You know, one of the questions that I get asked a lot is if I am going to write a book based on my experience on Skeptiko, what I’ve learned, and some of the crazy stories that have come up over the years. And I have always said no, but recently I’ve started to change my mind. Maybe a book that chronicles my journey, all the craziness that I have encountered with Skeptics, atheists, wacky scientism believers and all the fundamentalist religious types I have talked to – maybe that would be a good idea. I have always approached Skeptiko as my personal journey shared with others. But as you know, and I have said this so many times, in this process I have realized that really sharing these interviews with you, the listener, has been an important part of the whole thing because it has created this feedback loop that has really propelled me forward. You have suggested so many ideas for shows, you have also changed my thinking about shows and the way that I approach things, and that interaction has been an important part of this process for me.

So when I started thinking about this book, I started thinking about two things along those lines. One, I started thinking it might be good to write a book because I might get that interaction and feedback and have an opportunity to reformulate what I really think about these topics. And number two, I thought why don’t I write the book in a way that promotes that feedback, promotes that interaction with you, the Skeptiko audience. And I think I came up with a pretty cool, interesting way of doing this – at least, I have never heard anyone do it this way before. So let me tell you a little bit about that and then also tell you about the topic that we’re going to start with today – Skeptics and mediums.

So here goes, here is the book. Every book needs a title, here is mine: Why Skeptics Are Wrong… About Almost Everything. Here then is how I am going to write it, and I just alluded to this, but I am going to go through the topics that we have covered on Skeptiko, these big topics that science and no one else ever seems to tackle completely. And I am going to re-examine them, primarily focused on this idea of how Skeptics look at it. And from what I have experienced, and you know this if you listen to the show, how hopelessly flawed the skeptical take on these things invariably turns out to be. Of course, I am not saying that the Skeptics are always wrong by definition, I am just saying they have a really, really bad batting average, at least from my experience. And there is a reason for that. There is a reason why this skeptical nonsense is engineered to fail. And that is something I would like to talk about as well. Spoiler alert – it’s because they got the consciousness science thing all wrong. But we will get to that in a minute.

One thing I would like to emphasize from the beginning is I don’t have a lot of answers, at least not anything that is firmed up. But I think, as you will appreciate, on a lot of these big question areas just being able to say, ‘That’s probably not the answer,’ is a huge paradigm-shifting step forward. So that’s what this book is going to try to do. It’s a book that is going to look at the best evidence that I have discovered on topics like consciousness, near-death experience, telepathy, psychics, UFOs, and a lot of other stuff. And then in particular I am going to focus on whether the skeptical party line – and there is always a skeptical party line – will look at how that stacks up against the evidence that I have discovered on Skeptiko. So I plan to tackle one topic in each chapter of the book. For example, in this show and in this chapter I am going to talk about why Skeptics are wrong about psychics and mediums. So I am going to go over some of the basics and then I am going to explain why we might want to look past some of the debunking shenanigans and wholesale dismissal of these phenomena that we hear constantly from Skeptics. The chapter of this episode and what you’re going to hear is going to draw from the shows and the many interviews I have done with psychics and mediums and, of course, researchers in the field.

Now, as you know because you are listening to this right now, I am going to publish an audio version of each chapter on the Skeptiko show and after I publish it I am going to ask for your help in suggesting any additions, deletions, or other edits that I might want to make to this chapter. I then plan on rolling those changes into the transcript and handing it off to my writer/editor/co-author to whip into shape and voila! Hopefully I will have a book out of this. Oh yeah, speaking of writer/editor/co-author, I am looking for someone. So if you are out there and you are a good fit for this gig and can live with the very modest advance that I am offering, then drop me an email and let’s chat about that. Finally, just to mention as an aside, as with all the “products†on Skeptiko, the book will be free or as close to free as is practical given the realities of Amazon book publishing and the need to kind of get this thing out there. At any rate, it is not a money making proposition, it is just a way to further explore these very underexplored areas of skepticism and science.

So let’s get going with the chapter on why Skeptics are wrong about psychics and mediums. By the way, this isn’t necessarily going to be the first episode in the book it is just the first episode I am publishing and I picked it because I realized I haven’t touched on this topic in quite a while and I thought it would be good to dive back in. And as a matter of fact, as I got into it I am really glad that I did because what I realized is how many interviews and how much work I did on this topic. I counted them up and I found at least 25 interviews. And that doesn’t include all the private interviews I did with mediums as part of this research demonstration project that you will hear about.

So before I get into all that let me start with the big picture. I want to answer that question that I asked right off the bat. So why are Skeptics wrong about psychics and mediums? And this is an important reframing – why do Skeptics believe that no one in recorded history has ever had some form of strange, unexplainable communication with a deceased loved one? Three reasons: number one, they are willfully ignorant of the research; number two, they never properly investigated the topic themselves; and number three, they life in a constructed world view that doesn’t allow this stuff to happen. So first off let me go back and talk a little bit about my framing of the skeptical assertion. No one ever has had any form of anomalous communication in any form – auditory, or a smell that came up that couldn’t be explained, any of the things that you hear about in all these things – that has never happened, ever in history, in any form, with any deceased loved one. That’s the skeptical claim. Now, as we will see in a minute, Skeptics like to focus on psychic scams, overblown claims of mediums, and all this other stuff in order to ridicule anyone associated with the topic. So they want to focus on some of the fraud and deception that we know of because that’s a pretty effective technique to get people distracted. If someone focuses on a grieving parent who got ripped off by some psychic scam artist, well then you’re well on your way to derailing any serious consideration of this topic. But that’s not what I wanted to do when I investigated, and that’s not what I want to do here in this episode. If we can manage to side step that bit of skeptical sleight of hand that wants you to focus on the psychic scams, we can take a step back and really look at the scientific claim they’re making – no one, ever, in any way, right? That’s the claim. Because if anyone ever got a single bit of information from some non-physical, spiritual, whatever that means, kind of being, then the Skeptics are wrong. And more importantly, the scientific paradigm that we have built upon that idea, that it can never happen, well then that falls too.

Let me take you back, then, to the beginning of my exploration of this topic on Skeptiko. It began when I contacted Dr. Gary Schwartz in 2006. Now, as some of you know, Dr. Gary Schwartz is a professor of psychology and medicine at the University of Arizona and he really became associated with this topic and caused quite a stir back in the early 2000s, at least for a little bit he did. And I say a little bit because as you are going to see or hear, the story of Dr. Schwartz in addition to offering some fascinating research in psychics and mediums also provides some interesting insights into how the whole skeptical academia status quo power structure really operates. More on that in a minute.

First a little bit about Gary who, as it turns out, is an incredibly smart guy with a PhD in psychology from Harvard University, then became an assistant professor at Harvard for five years – which if you know anything about academia is unheard of, that you get a PhD and they respect you so much that they immediately put you on the faculty. Later he was the chair of the department of psychology and psychiatry at Yale University. I mean, this is a stellar academic background. And then believe it or not, because he has the cred, he received a $2 million grant from NIH to study this kind of fringe medium, frontier of science consciousness stuff. Unheard of that he could get money for this. So anyway, he has all this academic credibility and he becomes really interested in psychics and mediums and he starts investigating them. He has these amazing findings and starts publishing these books so then he becomes the whack-a-mole that sticks his head up and he becomes a huge target.

So the first attack on Gary Schwartz is that his research is crap. And one of the reasons I want to go over his academic credentials and one of the reasons they are so interesting in this case is because the claim made against Dr. Schwartz and his research into mediumistic communication – and it’s the same claim that’s repeated with mantra-like repetitiveness against all researchers in this area – was that he hadn’t implemented proper controls in his experiments. Now mind you, we’re not talking about sophisticated controls here. I mean, they are somewhat sophisticated but not really. And you will hear much more about this later in the show. But the basic proposition here is that the medium needs to be blinded from outside information. Very basic, common sense stuff. So look, the whole idea that a guy like Gary Schwartz with a stellar academic background, a guy who has published over 400 scientific papers including six in the journal Science – the idea that he is stumbling over basic, common sense blinding problems, the kind of mistakes that a freshman psychology student would make, it’s just a silly claim. It’s an outrageous claim. But it still gets a lot of traction, especially for folks who are looking to take down Gary Schwartz and this research. Because these are debunkers and they are just looking for anything to attack. So they attacked his research and then they circled the wagons and then they really got him. In 2007 they got a sensationalized, Geraldo Rivera story – literally Geraldo Rivera on TV – about Dr. Schwartz’s fundraising and they called that into question and they had the grieving parent on there and the whole thing. You can go read about all that, I am not going to go into the whole story here, but Dr. Schwartz being a sharp guy and a smart guy realized it was time to pull the plug on the medium research, at least at the University of Arizona. He backed off of all of that and he has a lot of other research that he has continued to do. He didn’t lose his job or anything like that. But I am sure the powers that be at Arizona said, ‘Hey, we don’t need that kind of attention.’ And Dr. Schwartz moved on.

Fortunately for me, that’s where the story really begins because while I had talked to Gary a couple of times I had never managed to get a full interview out of him. But what I did manage to get was an introduction to his research associate who, as it turns out, is really the person who is doing the heavy lifting when it came to medium research, setting up protocols, doing analysis, all of that stuff. And her name is Dr. Julie Beischel, who is quite a delightful person – really smart, PhD in pharmacology, expert on really setting up protocols to test medicine, pharmacology and getting stuff past the FDA – and really smart about research and testing protocols. So I met Julie several times in person. If you have listened to the show you would know I have had her on the show several times as well and what I wanted to do for this chapter is share with you an interview I did with Julie back in August of 2008. This is when I had just started my own research into psychics and mediums and it is back when I naively thought that all it took to convince Skeptics was some good solid research. So in this interview you will hear me reference Ben Radford, who is a science writer and a skeptic who came on Skeptiko with all these reasons why this research should be ignored, all these criticisms of Gary Schwartz’s research and the research in general. Turns out, of course, he didn’t have a clue of what he was talking about but that doesn’t matter. You will hear all of that. You will also hear reference to my old frenemy, Dr. Steven Novella, who is a neurologist at Yale, professor, and the skeptic who hosts a popular weekly skeptical podcast.

Now one of the things that I did way back in this research was to challenge Steve to take part in a research demonstration project with psychics and mediums. So I was on his show and I said, ‘Look, you guys don’t believe psychics and mediums are real – let’s do a demonstration. We’ll do a medium reading for you on the air and then we’ll rate it and see if anything comes out of that.’ Well, he initially agreed to this but he never really followed through, he didn’t respond to emails, the whole thing dragged down and fizzled out. But since he initially agreed to this, he sent me down this path of doing this project. I did the project, I did the medium research demonstration project and that’s why I have so many shows on psychics and mediums. I interviewed all these interesting people, all sorts of folks including hardcore skeptic Lynne Kelly. I did a show with her and she came on and claimed that you could demonstrate how cold reading techniques could explain everything you would ever want to know about psychic medium readings, which is a totally silly idea that you can dismiss after hearing about five minutes of what Julie has to say. But that’s just to give you an idea of the skeptical nonsense that I had to wade through to really cover this topic the way that I wanted to.

I also had some interesting interviews with Steven Novella, which you can go back and listen to. I am not going to include them in this chapter but if you want that kind of background it is kind of interesting to see how the whole project evolved in that way. But right now what I want to get to is this long clip – it’s actually most of the whole episode – from this interview that I had with Dr. Julie Beischel back in 2008.

Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris. Okay, now on today’s show we’re going to dig into the nuts and bolts of psychic medium research. We’re going to look back on some of what’s been done in the past and the criticisms of it, and we’re going to look forward to the kind of research we might do in the future in collaboration with open-minded skeptics like Ben Radford from the Skeptical Inquirer and Steve Novella from theSkeptics Guide to the Universe. And there’s no better person to join us and help us in this than Julie Beischel from the Windbridge Institute in Tucson. Julie, as many of you know from our previous interview with her, is researching medium communication as a way of answering or at least examining the bigger question of whether our consciousness survives death. So Julie, thanks for joining us again on Skeptiko.

Dr. Julie Beischel: Thanks for having me.

Alex Tsakiris: As you know, from the email dialogue that we’ve had back and forth we had Ben Radford on the last episode and we wound up kind of wading into this whole issue of medium communication. The work that you did with Gary Schwartz came up. I think what I’d like to do is start with a quote from Ben that kind of summarizes his feelings about that research, and then I want you to respond in general and I also want you to, and I think this will be interesting both to me and to our listeners, I want to work with you and go through the real timeline of what we’re talking about in terms of Gary’s publication of the afterlife experiment books, then the response by Ray Hyman, Gary’s response and then you joining the team at University of Arizona and what all of you went through, some of the changes you made and then your latest research. So, let’s kick that off by going back and listening again to what Ben had to say when he was on our show on the last episode.

Ben Radford: Let me give you another example, Gary Schwartz’s afterlife experiment. Gary Schwartz has published a couple of books and studies in which he’s claiming that there’s strong evidence for communication with the afterlife. Ray Hyman, whom I sure you know, the psychologist of the University of Oregon, an incredible statistician went through and looked at Schwartz’s claims. He found serious methodological flaws in the analysis and methodology.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so general response to that?

Dr. Julie Beischel: That book was published before I started performing mediumship research at the U of A, in fact, before I even knew what a medium was so I really can’t comment on his content because I wasn’t involved at all. Like you said there are several published critiques and responses if people are interested.

Alex Tsakiris: Here’s what I was trying to get at, Julie. It sounds to me like the chronology that we’re laying out here is this book comes out, Gary’s getting some criticism, and as you’ve related to us in the previous interview your meeting with Gary or the chance meeting that you had was really coincidental, and Gary saw in you the ability to maybe tighten up some protocols that he had and was developing and maybe wasn’t spending as much time on as he should have. Certainly your background would be something someone in Gary’s position would immediately see the value of in terms of what he’s doing. Tell me if that’s correct and how your background does fit with the kind of research that Gary was doing.

Dr. Julie Beischel: Well, I can’t really speak to what he was thinking when he met me, but what was conveyed to me because I had a strong background in methodological design in a “hard science,†Gary and the donor thought that would be helpful in the continuation of the research into yes, tighter protocols.

Alex Tsakiris: Because again, your background is pharmacology where you’re basically being trained to take new drugs and see if they’re safe and effective, right?

Dr. Julie Beischel: Yes, in essence that’s what pharmacology is.

Alex Tsakiris: So you and Gary started working together. When did you actually begin your research with Gary? When did you start developing a new protocol and then looking for participants and actually starting trials?

Dr. Julie Beischel: When I first came on board, I wasn’t very familiar with the field at all. He was sort of already in the process of asking questions like: Does the sitter need to be there for a reading to be successful or can a proxy sitter serve in place of the sitter? Does that work? Can you ask the medium specific questions about this carnate or does it need to be free form? So we did some of those sorts of studies at the beginning and then once I was learning more and more about the field, it became my goal to statistically establish the existence of the phenomenon of mediumship itself in a contemporary laboratory with modern mental mediums. I felt like that we had sort of skipped a couple of steps ahead, so we needed to back up to what we call the primary hypothesis which is can mediums do what they say they are doing? That’s when we performed, designed and recruited subjects and performed the study of that then went on to be published in the triple blind study. We nicknamed that the Primary Hypothesis Study, but we also call it the AIR which stands for Anomalous Information Reception which is what we call the phenomenon of process of mediumship.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so let’s deconstruct that a little bit. You felt and Gary felt obviously that maybe what needed to be done is to back up and look at the underlying hypothesis which is … how would you state the underlying hypothesis in kind of layman’s terms?

Dr. Julie Beischel: I could probably say this in my sleep. So the primary hypothesis is this: Skilled mediums can report accurate and specific information about the deceased loved one, termed discarnates, of living people termed sitters, without any prior knowledge about the discarnates or the sitters and in the complete absence of any sensory feedback.

Alex Tsakiris: So how do you think the works that had been done prior was not directly addressing that kind of underlying hypothesis? Where had we kind of ventured away from that a little bit?

Dr. Julie Beischel: Again, I wasn’t around for that. That book came out in 2002 so the current research is well beyond those methods. In our lab and other works that’s being done by, for instance, Archie Roy and Trisha Robertson in Scotland and Emily Kelly and Diane Archangel at the University of Virginia, so I don’t think it’s useful to sort of nitpick at that because we’re so far beyond it that it’s like saying, “Why did we think the earth was flat?†Well, it doesn’t matter because now we know that it’s not.

Alex Tsakiris: Maybe, but I think the part that I disagree with that is that the history of it I don’t think we have to run from and again, I think the historical context that I would add to it is that so if Gary Schwartz is the first one to, and he’s not the first one because there’s a hundred year history of this, but if he stumbles across this himself and is blown away by these readings and he goes in and he does what he does in afterlife experiments, I think it’s useful to look back and say, “Okay, objectively where was that maybe stretching the boundaries of what we really thought we know and where do we need to kind of pull in our ranks a little bit and go back to kind of the primary hypothesis that we’re looking at?†So, I’m not really asking you to comment on the research per se, but more why did you feel there was this need to, and we can move past this, but why was there a need to more tightly define the research hypothesis?

Dr. Julie Beischel: How about we can look at it like you said. It’s a hundred years of research so we can look at it in sort of a historical perspective: How did it used to be done and what we’re the problems and then how is the current research addressing those problems? Do you want to list those issues to me again and I’ll address those?

Alex Tsakiris: Sure, fair enough. I guess just to push that point a little bit further, I think the way that you described it and the way that you described your process of going back and saying, “Okay, what is the primary hypothesis?†I think it’s outstanding and if you’re recalling the interview that I had with Ben Radford last week, it’s a mistake that skeptics make as well. So you’re kind of saying, “Hey, I felt like maybe the lab was pushing the boundaries a little bit further than we needed to. We needed to take a step back.†Well, the same thing happens when you listen to skeptics and what they’ll do is when they get some data in that’s uncomfortable that pushes their boundaries like, “Hey, maybe I’m not in solid ground,†then they jump ahead and start asking hypothetical questions, “Well, then why isn’t the communication this way? Why can’t they answer this? Why can’t they answer this?†What I want to really make clear is how important it is to be crystal clear and focused in the research hypothesis and I think that’s something that you and Gary did to your credit on this second round or whatever round you want to call it, but you did. So again, let’s get back to the primary objection of that initial research from the University of Arizona was 1) a judging bias, 2) a controlled-group bias, and 3) the one that everyone really kind of grabs a hold of right off the bat is sensory leakage. Do you want to go through those?

Dr. Julie Beischel: Yeah, let’s go from the back and work backwards, so sensory leakage, yeah, if the medium and the sitter are in the same room obviously there’s sensory leakage even if you use a partition because the medium can as soon as the sitter says anything, the tone of voice, even if the sitter just says yes or no, like you can say yes or you can say, “Yes!†it’s very different and that gives a lot of information to the medium. So, you can’t have the medium and the sitter in the same room. There’s always going to be sensory leakage. Even on the telephone there’s sensory leakage for those same reasons where a lot of information comes through the sitter’s voice. So in the current research the sitter is not on the phone with the medium. It’s just a proxy sitter so I serve as a proxy sitter and it’s just the medium and I on the phone. I don’t know anything about the sitter or the deceased person. Then just the medium and I do everything.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s great and I want to make that crystal clear. On the readings that you are doing now, the medium never talks to the person they’re doing the reading for. Is that correct?

Dr. Julie Beischel: That’s correct.

Alex Tsakiris: So that part is totally out of the equation, and I want to just backtrack for a minute and point out that you’re talking about it in very tight scientifically-controlled terms, which is great. But the counter-claim to that has never been proven either, as far as I know, and that’s that sensory leakage, non-verbal cues, tone of voice can explain all the information that we know is passed between a reading. I’m not saying it is; I’m not saying it’s not. But sometimes when we hear that skeptical counter-claim, we have to keep in mind that that is an equally unproven scientific claim. In fact, cold reading demonstrations using the same kind of even lax controls that were used at the University of Arizona back in 2002 have never been done showing that you can get names of deceased relatives and be able to put all those together in a way that makes a meaningful reading. Now there’s no reason to go back and try to recreate kind of flawed protocol and see if it generates a good control to counter the work that was done, but I just feel a need to kind of point that out because sometimes when we see that we need to improve something it’s needed conceding that the counter-claim has really been established and I think in this case it hasn’t.

Dr. Julie Beischel: I would agree with that.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s move on and talk about controlled-group bias.

Dr. Julie Beischel: Let’s go to the other one because this same idea controls for rater bias, doesn’t hear the reading as it takes place, then we can give the sitter two different readings to score without knowing which is which. So that controls for reader bias because the sitter doesn’t know which reading is theirs and they score one that’s theirs and one that isn’t with the same, I don’t know how you want to say it, amount of bias or level of bias and it sort of washes it out then.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s break that down a little bit, because I think it slipped past me the first time I ran across your research. I’m trying to think what’s the best way to do this because we’re kind of talking about the end, the judging bias. Maybe at this point it would be more useful to go through and very quickly go over your protocol and then it just becomes crystal clear to anyone who’s objective that there cannot be any judging bias and there cannot be any controlled-group bias. So why don’t we start with going over how the protocol works?

Dr. Julie Beischel: Our current protocol uses a quintuple-blind methodology so there are five levels of blinding. How we do it is we start with a group of sitters and we screen them and they describe the one person they wish to hear from most that’s deceased. Then we take those descriptions and we find pairs of deceased people who are the most opposite and that creates a pair of sitters. Then each medium reads a pair of sitters and a pair of discarnates.

Alex Tsakiris: Now, hold on before you lose me and lose everybody else. So you start with all these potential people that would like to get a reading. One of the things that’s different from the prior research that was done at the University of Arizona is you narrow it down and say, “Okay, I want you just to select one person that you specifically want to talk to on the other side, if you will, one deceased person.†So this prevents the kind of fishing around that makes everyone uncomfortable both skeptics and believers where the medium goes, “It’s maybe aunt or maybe grandmother or a friend,†and all this because now the medium’s going to be tasked with just targeting in on just one specific deceased person. Is that correct?

Dr. Julie Beischel: That’s correct.

Alex Tsakiris: And the other thing that you do here that I think is really, really significant and it’s brought up or kind of, Ben Radford last week had a similar kind of thought without realizing that you had already done this in the research that you published more than a year and a half ago, and that’s you actually pre-select pairs of people based on how different the person that they’re trying to connect with is.

Dr. Julie Beishcel: Right, I wrote down a quote and I think this is close to what he said. He said, “Enough variation between subjects should exist so that meaningful distinctions between subjects can be made.†That’s exactly what we do.

Alex Tsakiris: So take us through an example of how that would work.

Dr. Julie Beischel: We pair the people to most opposite in age, physical description, personality description, hobbies, and cause of death.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so I come along and I’m a potential research participant and I say, “Gee Julie, I’d really like to connect with my grandmother who passed away. She passed away when she was 95 and she was a small woman in stature, five foot one, and she had olive skin and her hobbies were going to church and knitting.â€

Dr. Julie Beischel: Okay, we would find another sitter who had a discarnate that was young and active and blonde and had died of an accident rather than like your grandmother who died of old age. We pair the person to be most different on a variety. It’s hair coloring and build and height and cause of death would be part of the body that was affected fast or slow, natural or unnatural. Then hobbies are inside or outside.

Alex Tsakiris: We had a little bit of technical difficulty and I think what you were going over was all the different factors that you consider in a reading anyway and those are the ones that you kind of match for the maximum disparity possible. The reason that you do that is because … tell us.

Dr. Julie Beischel: We pair up pairs of discarnates to be most opposite. They’re the same in gender but most opposite in everything else. Then the same medium reads both people in the pair. If you said you wanted a reading from your grandmother and I wanted a reading from my sister, then a medium would do a reading for your grandmother and from sister. Then I would score both readings and you would score both readings, but we wouldn’t know which one was which because we weren’t there when the readings took place. So that controls for reader bias and then we give a score. I give a score to each reading and you give a score to each reading in addition to item by item scoring. There’s a very complicated scoring process. So my score of your reading serves as a control and your score of my reading serves as a control. Then we statistically compare the scores given by the intended sitter to the intended reading and two of the scores given by the controlled sitter to the controlled reading.

Alex Tsakiris: Awesome. Now let’s back up because actually, and I know you’re trying to make it as simple as possible, but there’s a couple of other steps that you go through there that are also interesting and noteworthy. So we’ll put you in the place of the person who’s talking to the medium. The first thing you say to the medium is you give the first name of the person you’re trying to connect with, right?

Dr. Julie Beischel: Yes, so during the reading all the medium and I have is the first name of the discarnate. We start the reading and I give the first name.

Alex Tsakiris: Great, and that’s a good point, too. That’s all you have, so you don’t have any information because we’re substituting you here as we said as a pronoun but it’s not really you. You end up being a person who decided who the two participants or who the two deceased people that we’re trying to connect with. You would be blind to that.

Dr. Julie Beischel: Right. A different experimenter does the pairing and screens the sitters. It’s my research assistant, Michael. So Michael gets on the phone with all the sitters. He gathers all the information. He does all the pairing and then I say, “Okay, I’m ready to do two readings,†and he gives me a first name.

Alex Tsakiris: Great. So you sit down there and you say, “Medium, I don’t know anything else other than I have a person here who wants to connect with someone named Sarah. Ready, go.†They go, so you’re blind to it. They’re blind to it. The reading happens. Now tell us a little bit about what happens after the reading has occurred, the transcribing and the reporting on that.

Dr. Julie Beischel: Let’s back up even a little more. During the reading, I give the medium the first name and they’re allowed to just give some general information for about ten minutes and then I ask those same four specific questions: Describe the physical appearance of the discarnate, describe their personalities, what were their hobbies or how did they spend their time, and what was their cause of death?

Alex Tsakiris: Good point. So even in that part though, for ten minutes you go, “Okay, medium. Go ahead, what are you getting? Sarah.†They can just say anything and then you take them through a very targeted process, which is also a very important difference with the way the prior medium research at the University of Arizona was done. One big difference that we pointed out at the beginning is now we’ve targeted one specific deceased person. We’re really not interested in information that comes through other deceased people. And number two, we’re targeting in on certain specific bits of information that we want. What did they look like – build, height, hair? What was their personality – introvert, extrovert? Hobbies, cause of death. These are really specific things that you are now asking without knowing what the answer should be or could be. You’re just asking the medium for responses to those, right?

Dr. Julie Beischel: Correct.

Alex Tsakiris: Now the reading ends. What happens next?

Dr. Julie Beischel: Then I’m still blinded. I still don’t know anything, so I take the recording of the reading and I turn it into a list of single individual items of the information that the medium provided. So part of that formatting process is if the medium makes any reference to the name that I have then I pull out all of those references. I pull out all of the maybes and the could bes. So if the medium says, “I think maybe, I’m sort of getting that she might have had red hair,†my item is she had red hair because you can’t say whether she maybe had red hair if that’s true or not and we’re asking the sitter if this is true or not. I’m not totally versed in every single mediumship study that ever existed on the planet, but I think that’s relatively uncommon. I think that’s a newer protocol.

Alex Tsakiris: Great. So now you’re formatting a transcript. First you get it all transcribed and then you’re formatting it down to these single declarative kind of statements of facts. A couple of things that you mentioned, just to be clear, if I said you’re doing a reading for Sarah you would take obviously any references to the name Sarah because that would tip off that that’s who the reading is for.

Dr. Julie Beischel: That’s exactly right.

Alex Tsakiris: And then you have these number of other things like you said. You make the statements clear. You take any kind of medium speak of … give me an example of some of the medium speak.

Dr. Julie Beischel: I wrote a paper about all this methodology that came out in the Journal of Parapsychology and I think the example that I used in that paper is a medium might say, “I’m getting that Sarah is below you, below the sitter, pardon me,†then that means that they’re in a younger generation. If they said that they’re to the side of that means they’re in the same generation or above is a generation older. I put brackets and I sort of define what the medium speak means to the sitter.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, and this isn’t something you came up with. This is just something, a shorthand way of talking that the medium has that you’re translating for the benefit of the sitter.

Dr. Julie Beischel: It is language that mediums use naturally and then I define it for the sitter.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, great. So now let’s get down to the payoff. Now you’ve done a couple of readings with you being the intermediary. You’ve transcribed them, broken them down into single list of kind of declarative statements, “Her hair is red. She passed away this way. She was introverted. She liked this, blah, blah, blah.†Now what happens?

Dr. Julie Beischel: So now I send those two readings, and they’re just numbered Reading 1 and 2, I send those to a third experimenter, Mark, and then Mark and I say, “These two readings for these two discarnates.†We’ll name them in groups so Michael says, “Here are two names in Group A.†Then we do the readings and then I send the two blind readings to Mark and I say, “These are the two readings from Group A,†but he doesn’t know which one is for which name and he sends them to the sitters for scoring. So now none of us can accidentally convey anything to anybody because we don’t know anything to convey.

Alex Tsakiris: So now the next person in this chain who you said is Mark. Mark gets the two readings and he sits down with me and says, “Okay, Alex, you wanted to connect with your grandmother, Sarah. Here are two readings. I don’t know which one is for your grandmother Sarah, but one of them is and one is for another person.†Then I’m asked to do what?

Dr. Julie Beischel: He doesn’t sit down with you. He emails the readings to you and Michael has previously trained you on how to do the scoring. So Mark sends you two readings. You already know how to do the scoring and by yourself you score each of the readings and you email back your scores.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, basically how am I scoring these?

Dr. Julie Beischel: You have the list of items, so you score each item for how we say, “Think to yourself, how well does this piece of information fit?†So you can give it a numerical score and there are not five isn’t one better than four. They’re just named zero through five. Five is obvious fit. It’s a concrete hit. Four is fit requiring minimal interpretation to fit, like they almost got it; that’s pretty close. Three is a fit requiring maximum interpretation like, “Ah, I guess if you really squinted your eyes that might be right.†Then two is it doesn’t fit the person whose name the reading was for, but it fits somebody else. One is no fit; that’s totally wrong. Zero is “I don’t know. I don’t have the information to know whether that’s right or wrong.†Then when we do the analysis, we use scores as four or five as hits and all the rest of them we consider misses. You also give the whole reading a score from zero to six, which is a different scale. That scale is based on the work of Russell Targ, the scoring they developed for remote viewing, like how you would score a remote viewer’s picture or response. The third way of “scoring†is we say, “Pick which reading you think is yours.†So you have this item by item percent of accurate items data, and then you have a whole reading zero to six score of the reading. Then you have a binary yes or no “Is this your reading?†so you can do statistics on each one of those pieces of data.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. The reason you can, again, is because the whole process we went through is just like me sitting down with these random facts that I have no idea where they came from and I have to pick whether they fit, whether they match, rate them on a scale on how well they fit and then come up with an overall evaluation. So at this point we’ve kind of addressed, I think, now let’s go back to the points we were talking about a few minutes ago, the judging bias now in the controlled-group bias are both addressed. What was the complaint or the criticism, and there was some validity to it, of the previous objection to the judging bias?

Dr. Julie Beischel: Well, if you know the reading is yours, rater biases, if you know the reading is yours you have a tendency to score it as either more or less accurate than it is in reality. But if you don’t which one is yours, then you’ll score them with the same amount of bias.

Alex Tsakiris: So if this is the reading that I got back, I might want to please either the medium or the experimenter or I might want to displease either the medium or the experimenter. Or, it might just be human nature that I want to cooperate. I want to get along so I start seeing things in certain ways. That’s kind of out of the equation now because I now have no knowledge which one of these readings pertain to me and there’s no way I could have any knowledge of them.

Dr. Julie Beischel: Right. If you score a bunch of things as right, you’ll score a bunch of things as right in both of the readings so statistically that will cancel out and if you score both things low, statistically that will cancel out. What the statistic looks for is the difference between the two not, “She got 77 percent right.†It doesn’t matter. It’s what the difference is between the scores given by the sitters to their own readings and the scores that they gave to someone else’s readings without knowing which is which.

Alex Tsakiris: Great, and what about the medium who is giving a lot of generalities to their answers and are just kind of fishing around? How does that not affect this process?

Dr. Julie Beischel: Well, we’re asking for specific information, so they can’t just give general because we’re asking for specific pieces of information. If they just give general, “He’s kind of short but kind of tall,†that’s two items now. He’s kind of short and he’s kind of tall. So a medium that just provided general information, one would have a low accuracy percentage and the sitter would have a lot of trouble discerning between the two readings and they probably would have a low record of the sitter’s choice.

Alex Tsakiris: And what you’d wind up with at the end of the day is chance, sitters picking readings and basically picking them at chance levels – 50/50 kind of scores. Or if you’re saying how “What score would you give it – one through six?†everyone’s going to be at the three kind of middle ground. That’s not in the published research that you’ve done published back in 2006, 2007, I’m sorry. But you did it in 2006, published it in January 2007, correct?

Dr. Julie Beischel: I think we probably did it in 2005, but go ahead.

Alex Tsakiris: I think the chronology is really important and I want to get back to this later, but this is work that has been out there for a while. So you published it in January 2006, it’s not like we’re springing something on people here.

Dr. Julie Beischel: January 2007, so it’s almost two years old now.

Alex Tsakiris: So in that published study, I think you had sixteen times where people had to choose “which reading is mine.†What percentage of time did they choose the correct reading?

Dr. Julie Beischel: 81 percent. So thirteen of those sixteen people.

Alex Tsakiris: And that’s a pretty impressive, I assume that was statistically significant if I remember correctly from the paper.

Dr. Julie Beischel: Yes, it’s quite significant like you’re looking for a P value of less than .05 and I think that P was .001.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, with that in mind now we’ve gone back and I hope that isn’t too detailed and exhausting for people, but I just think that’s fascinating. I think the whole process is extremely tight in my opinion and I’m certainly open to, I’m not a scientist, and I’m open to other people who are critical of your work to come forward and say where the gaping flaws and holes are. But it sure seems to me like it’s addressed the main issues. With that in mind, let me go back and play a couple more clips from Ben’s interview on the last episode and then in light of what we now know and have talked about, let’s hear what you might have to say about a couple of these.

Ben Radford: I do know about the research and one of the problems, one of the issues it doesn’t address is that in many of these cases the verification of the information is provided by the sitter. That is this not information that is supposedly coming from the great beyond that is verified by a third party person. Much of this was information where the medium will say, “I’m getting information from your husband or grandfather or whoever else,†and the information is judged either accurate or inaccurate by the sitter and there is an inherent problem right now that has not been addressed.

Alex Tsakiris: I just want to remind people that I specifically said, “Julie Beischel is on this show and she’s done this new research,†and he responded, “Yeah, I’m familiar with that research.†So just as a grounding that’s where we’re all coming from on that. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Julie Beischel: I’m going to use that, our current peer review methods, to address that. He’s listing as a criticism the fact that the sitter is the person that judges the information as accurate or inaccurate. So it’s important to keep in mind the scope and the goal of the research. The goal isn’t to prove the existence of an afterlife are inaccurate. Anyone on my team would say we’re not trying to prove an afterlife. That is not the goal. What we’re doing is examining the processes of mediumship in its natural environment with the proper controls, so normal readings between a medium and a sitter. Again, the general hypothesis we’re testing is can mediums report accurate and specific information without any prior knowledge and in the absence of any sensory feedback. So with that being the goal, the sitter has to be the person that is the judge because the information was intended for the sitter. We don’t ask the hypothesized discarnate. I’m just going to put an asterisk there. Every time I say “discarnate†I mean hypothesized discarnate. I’m not implying we have established that the medium is talking to a dead person because we haven’t. So the hypothesized discarnate, we don’t ask the hypothesized discarnate to take an algebra exam and provide information a third party could determine is accurate. That’s not what a mediumship reading is. We’re asking them to communicate with their friends and family, the only people who can determine if the information is correct and applicable.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, that’s a good, very, very good point and to just declare from where I think Ben was coming from one of the criticisms of the prior research done at the University of Arizona is that if a person comes through and says, “I think I’m connecting with an aunt figure and her name is Dolly,†then the person who is accepting the reading can say, “Yeah, yeah that’s right.†Then there isn’t the independent verification of whether that’s right or wrong but that was troubling to some skeptics.

Dr. Julie Beischel: Right, because how could you verify whether or not something was wrong about my entire life? I couldn’t tell you everything you would need to know to do that. I don’t know how that’s even possible.

Alex Tsakiris: You’ve gotten around that whole issue by how? How have you specifically kind of addressed this issue that there is someone there who’s making these subjective judgments about the accuracy of the data?

Dr. Julie Beischel: We’re controlling for reader bias by having the person score two blinded readings and we’re comparing their score of a reading intended for them to their score of a reading not intended for them.

Alex Tsakiris: So the big problem before is the skeptics will point out, and in some cases very correctly, is that the reading could pile up like positive points like, “That’s a hit. That’s another hit. That’s another hit. Oh, your percent is going up and up and up.†Now what you’ve done is kind of taken that out of the equation because it really doesn’t matter how high or how accurate any particular reading is, it’s more of a comparison. How does this reading compare with the other reading? That’s how you’ve really, I think, in very novel way controlled for this whole idea of rater bias. They can be biased one way or another way but it’s going to wash out with the controlled reading that they have.

Dr. Julie Beischel: Right. They’ll be the same bias for each reading because they won’t know which is theirs.

Alex Tsakiris: Here’s the next quote from Ben.

Ben Radford: Part of the problem here that those descriptions that you just gave, those can still be vague. Someone says, “You know the person who’s coming through is a tall man with gray hair.†Well, it turns out that when the person died, he was bald. This gets back to the problem of having a sitter verify the information because the sitter says, “Yes, he had gray hair,†then that’s a hit. That’s good information, but the medium could also say he was bald in which case the sitter would say, “Well, he had gray hair but in his last years he was bald.†So you can have a medium giving two contradictory pieces of information, both of which would be considered a hit by the sitter.

Alex Tsakiris: I think we’ve probably covered that, but go ahead.

Dr. Julie Beischel: I think this is important just to address and then I’ll get to that specifically. Ideally laboratory-based mediumship research has to include two things: 1) an environment that optimizes the process for everyone involved, the medium, the hypothesized discarnate, the sitter in order to increase the probability of capturing the phenomenon if it exists, and 2) methods that maximize the blinding to control for any conventional explanations for the information. So together those two factors optimize the possibility of achieving positive results while also controlling for experimental artifacts.

Alex Tsakiris: Hold on! Hold on, wait.

Dr. Julie Beischel: I have a real world example that will make that much more understandable.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, go.

Dr. Julie Beischel: We use this metaphor: You can’t study football on a basketball court using baseball players and the rules for hockey because if you get negative results you can’t say, “I’ve disproven the phenomenon of football†in that case because you’re on a basketball court using baseball players and the rules for hockey. That’s not a proper experiment. Similarly, it’s not appropriate to claim that Jason Elim could kick a 95-yard field goal if you give him a Nerf football, an empty stadium and no defensive line. That’s not real football either. In order to study football appropriately only trained skilled participants and the regulation equipment, environment and regulations can be used. The same thing is true for mediumship. So, negative results from a study using methods that didn’t optimize the environment and positive maximized blinding are equally ineffective at establishing new knowledge.

Alex Tsakiris: And this goes back to what you’ve been calling a naturalistic or a natural setting that tries to put everyone in the position that they are when people report these fantastic readings and I think that’s so common sense and yet it get so mixed up in the minds of skeptics so many times when I hear it. It goes back to your initial research hypothesis or proposition. If we’re going to study if medium communication is real, shouldn’t we do everything possible to let the medium and the sitter have at it in the way that they feel most comfortable with the only caveat being that we want to put the proper experimental controls on it? That just seems like common sense to me.

Dr. Julie Beischel: Yeah, and some people call that, “Oh, you’re cheating then!†because you’re optimizing. But it’s the same thing as saying, “If you give the football player a football instead of a watermelon…†or you know. It’s not cheating. It’s optimizing so you can watch the process as it takes place take place. I think people fail to understand that proper research design includes optimizing the possibility of achieving positive results. If you wanted to study plant growth, you don’t put a dry seed on the bench top in the lab and then say, “Plants can’t grow.†You use soil and water and sunlight, and then you study the growth of the seed.

Alex Tsakiris: Right. Do everything possible. Once you put the proper controls in place, why not do everything possible to recreate the phenomena? I completely agree. Now, what about Ben’s point about the information being vague? Maybe I say, “The hair was black, but I was bald older.â€

Dr. Julie Beischel: Okay, I think his main point was that two pieces of contradictory information can be judged as hits by the sitter. Again, we have to keep in mind the process of mediumship. So first, the medium is interpreting images, symbols, sounds, whatever so she actually may receive two items that appear contradictory but we instruct them to say what they see. That’s the process and we’re studying the process so we can’t mess with the process. Second, as is often the case, as anyone who has ever been in a relationship can attest communication between people is not black and white. Things can be contradictory and accurate at the same time.

Alex Tsakiris: So then let’s follow that piece of information or those seemingly contradictory pieces of information through your protocol and see what happens at the end and see if they do create this mix up in the final judging of the data. So the person says, “Black hair, bald.†Two things that are contradictory. Older in life they were bald. Earlier in life they had black hair. How do you score it? How do you report it? And then how does the sitter score it?

Dr. Julie Beischel: We’re not asking the medium to describe a photo of the discarnate. We’re asking them to describe aspects of the whole entire dynamic lifespan of the person. Just like that’s entirely accurate for the person to be bald at some points in their life and dark hair in some points of their life and the discarnate may present themselves to the medium in each of those ways. It’s accurate for the sitter to score each of those items as accurate because they are both accurate. During scoring, again we’re not ranking up the number of hits. We’re comparing the number