If you’re not familiar with the term, that’s okay. You’ve come across it under different headings, probably, be they ESP, remote viewing, or psychokinesis (PK). They are “psychic powers” or, psi. There’s a fair degree of likelihood you also believe in at least one of the above phenomena on some level. That’s understandable.

I can’t disprove that human beings possess psychic powers, and really, nobody else can either. On a fundamental level of basic logic, this would fall under the category of proving a negative, and that can’t be done. So I’ll leave you to your own opinions on the matter. But I will tell you why I don’t think there is such a thing as psi. That’s what I’m here for, after all.

In the last fifty-odd years the not-altogether respected field of parapsychology has blossomed thanks to the groundbreaking work of many scientists who began with “I believe in psi” and ended with “and I’m going to prove it’s real.” Because that’s the way things work in the sciences. Before researching practical applications and what-have-you, it’s a good idea to know you’re researching a genuine phenomenon.

And, you would think, in the last fifty-odd years, parapsychology had at least been able to confirm that psi exists.

So have they?

The answer to that question depends on who you ask. But before you ask a parapsychologist, maybe you should know what the rules are. They have their own rules when it comes to examining their results. So I give you the rules, as summarized by James Randi in his awkwardly titled "An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural":

“1: No real psychic can produce phenomena upon command or on a regular basis. Thus the performer who can consistently turn out effects that defy explanation by ordinary means is considered a fraud, and the one who ‘hits and misses’ or who has periods of impotency is judged to be the real goods.

“2: Cheating is a compulsion of the psychic, something that he feels he must do given the opportunity. But he is forgiven for this, since he can’t resist the feeling.

“3: Unless the detractor is able to explain away ALL the phenomena exhibited by the psychic as done by ordinary means, he has failed to prove his case. Similarly, those who have been exposed as cheats or who have confessed are still assumed to have a margin of real powers that they have been unable to organize effectively.

“4: Psychics cannot be expected to produce results when persons of negative attitude are present, nor when controlled so as to inhibit their sense of trusting and being trusted.”

Lest you think that nobody who wishes to consider themselves practitioners of the scientific method could seriously employ such fallacious logic when in the discourse of science, I give you another quote. When one of the most famous of the parapsychologists, S. G. Soal, was discovered to have cheated by deliberately fudging data on a psi test, here is what investigator J. G. Pratt had to say:

“[Soal may] have used precognition when inserting digits into the columns of numbers he was copying down, unconsciously choosing numbers that would score hits on the call the subject would make later.”

If you think this logical, perhaps you have a great future ahead of you in the field of parapsychology.

Consider the practical advantages these rules serve. If the person you’re testing is caught cheating, well, that’s okay, because he wasn’t cheating the times he wasn’t caught. How do you know? You didn’t catch him. If another laboratory attempts to perform the necessary replication of your experiments but come up with non-confirming results, that’s okay too, because skepticism automatically nullifies psychic powers.

Or say someone who has no stake your experiments comes in and observes your trials. Say that person notices there’s a way for your subject to cheat (i.e., get the answers or create the results through non-psychic means) and suggests a way to eliminate cheating as a possibility. You’re feeling gregarious, so you adopt the proposals. Suddenly, the remarkable results you’d been getting disappear. Do you then conclude, as a reasonable scientist, that the subject had been cheating all along? Of course not. Obviously, the new controls make the subject nervous, which creates a situation in which psi cannot function. So you loosen the controls again. Perhaps you even defend this decision by espousing the honorable nature of your laboratory psychic.

If you look closely at the rules, you’ll find there is a way to explain away every single negative result every single parapsychologist has managed to come across. In fact, by these rules, I’M psychic, and so are you. And so is my dog.

The annals of parapsychology are littered with one poorly controlled experiment after another. They range from minor statistical errors to outright fraud, and sometimes veer into unadulterated comedy. Take for example Professor John Taylor, who claimed he had tested a dozen children who could bend spoons with their minds. It turned out the only time any of them could do it was when NOBODY ELSE WAS IN THE ROOM. Rather than suggest the possibility that the children were simply bending the spoons by pressing them up against a table, something called the “shyness effect” was invoked. (It is, by the way, deceptively easy to bend a spoon, but I’ll save details on this for a later column on Uri Geller, who deserves one all his own.)

This is not to say all parapsychologists are de facto poor scientists, or even poor practitioners of laboratory science. Many of them come from respectable positions in respectable fields, such as physics. (For some reason, a lot of parapsychologists are also physicists.) And many of them design perfectly valid experiments that would work perfectly well provided they were testing animals or inanimate objects. What they consistently fail to take into account is the possibility that their human subject is versed in sleight of hand.

The only practical difference between a conjuror and a psychic is that the conjuror will tell you it’s only a trick. But when facing the argument that their prized psychic might be no more than a good conjuror, the typical response of the parapsychologist is “I’m a scientist; I can’t be fooled by a magic trick.” This is, naturally, patently ridiculous.

Given the choice between performing a magic act in front of a roomful of scientists or a crowd of children, a magician will opt for the scientists every time. Why? A magic performance hinges on the magician’s ability to confound the assumptions of an adult. The conjuror will know that a certain form of redirection will work on an adult of sound mind, but he cannot be certain that the redirection will succeed in the case of a child, because children don’t always think logically or follow the same visual cues. In other words, generally speaking, the higher the intelligence of the audience, the more likely the trick will work. Scientists are exactly the sort of people sleight of hand will fool, every time.

There are other ways a seemingly good experiment can go wrong, even with the most reasoned of investigators. Sometimes it has nothing to do with a cheating subject or an error-ridden test.

Let’s construct a generic example of a psi experiment. In one room we put a computer that chooses the numbers 1-4 at random, and test subject A. Subject A’s job is to send the information psychically to subject B. Subject B is in a separate room, and their job it is to receive the “sent” number and record it on a second computer. The two computers record the choices, and the results are subsequently compared.