Testing mediums: Beischel excerpt #15

Julie Beischel writes in “Beyond Reasonable: Scientific Evidence for Survival,” her prize-winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies competition: 

 

Formulate a Hypothesis 

 

In order to fulfill the mission of science and gain new knowledge, my colleagues and I hypothesized that what mediums experience as survival psi is different than the phenomenon proposed by the somatic psi theory. 

 

Design and Perform Experiments and Analyze the Data 

 

This hypothesis falls within the field of phenomenology, the study of experiences as they are experienced by the experiencer. The word phenomenology is also used to refer to the experiences themselves. For examinations of experiences like mediumship, phenomenological research methods usually employ collecting introspective verbal reports from participants. For many phenomena, researchers only have the reports of the person having the experience. To assess pain, for example, different sections of the standard McGill Pain Questionnaire ask respondents to choose specific descriptors to qualify their pain as, for example, throbbing, shooting, stabbing, crushing, searing, and/or vicious and also rate its strength from mild to excruciating. 

 

Similarly, depression has no biological marker and is often assessed on the basis of self-report or, since 1960, by using a version of the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, or Ham-D. We cannot objectively measure fatigue, anger, or psychiatric disorders like sociopathy. We regularly rely on phenomenological reports. Indeed, a lot of psi research is contingent on participant reports of their experiences. We can only ask participants to choose which image from several that they dreamed of, remote viewed, or intuited; we can’t directly observe which image appeared in their minds. Obviously, there are limitations to using the reports of humans about their experiences, but “it is still the best method we have”. 

 

In the next set of experiments, we wanted to examine mediums’ phenomenology related to survival psi (communication with the deceased) and somatic psi. However, somatic psi cannot be specifically requested; we can’t instruct a research medium to, “Get information about a discarnate, but don’t actually communicate with the discarnate.” That is not how it works for them. Additionally, we couldn’t prove they’d done that anyway: somatic psi cannot be experimentally demonstrated. Source, remember, cannot be determined from content. Thus, the phenomenon closest to somatic psi that we can use experimentally is psychic readings for living people. 

 

So, we designed and performed a series of experiments to assess mediums’ phenomenology during mediumship readings for the deceased using survival psi and during psychic readings for the living to represent the theoretical concept of somatic psi. Here, I will nickname these studies UVO-I, UVO-II, and UVO-III as shorthand for these sUrvival psi Vs sOmatic psi examinations. 

 

Because both are psi experiences and involve anomalous information transfer, we expected to see similarities but were on the look-out for differences. I will highlight the differences we noted here. Some are simply related to the different functions of psychic and mediumship readings, but some speak to different sources for the types of information mediums report. 

 

UVO-I Study: Qualitative Analysis 

 

We wanted to first formally collect retrospective reports from the pre-screened WCRMs on the team. My colleagues and I asked six WCRMs (all the mediums on the team at the time) two counter-balanced questions. We asked them to describe their subjective experience when communicating with discarnates during mediumship readings and also during psychic readings in which they use telepathy, precognition, or clairvoyance to provide information about the living but in which they do not communicate with discarnates. 

 

My colleagues used a qualitative thematic analysis methodology to find common themes in the WCRMs’ descriptions that I had collected. One difference that emerged is that survival psi experiences were described as including “signs” confirming the presence of the discarnate; these included visual (e.g., light flashes), auditory (e.g., ringing), and physical (e.g., heat, vibration) signs. The WCRMs also reported experiencing discarnates as separate, independent entities capable of, for example, arguing with or startling them. One participant said, “Now you would think being a medium I would want to look and connect with them sitting on the edge of my bed. What really happens is they startle me which makes me freak out!”. 

 

My favorite quote about the differences between the two experiences collected during this study was this: “a psychic reading is like reading a book... a mediumship reading is like seeing a play.” The UVO-I Study data demonstrate that these WCRMs were able to effectively describe—so that researchers were able to find common themes in their descriptions—the specific differences in how they experience communication with the deceased and while performing psychic readings for the living.

 

 

 

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics. For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).