davefoc
Philosopher
I've been interested enough in this ganzfield stuff a couple of times to spend a little time investigating it.
I was under the impression that what curious said was the way they were conducted. The transmitter views a random image and attempts to send it to the receiver. At the end of the transmission phase the receiver is shown four random images and he picks the one he thinks that the transmitter was looking at. I spent some time trying to figure out away that a non-random effect in either the images or the leanings of the transmitter could lead to a non 25% result with this procedure and couldn't see one. I know the receiver is supposed to sit there and talk about images that he thinks he's receiving but I didn't understand that this had anything to do with the test.
But even if there is somebody there that interprets what the receiver is saying and he is responsible for picking the most likely image I don't see how this can lead to a non-25% result.
My own objection to the process when I last looked at this was the great variation in test results between the experiments. If I recall correctly many tests had results wildly better than average but the overall effect was canceled out by roughly average effects in other tests. Speaking as an engineer who used to do quite a bit of testing, a wildly non-random result would have served as the basis for a very extensive investigation. Being a skeptic I would have assumed experimental error and devoted considerable time to investigating the possibility of that. Assuming I couldn't find experimental error and I still had a repeatable test I would have been driven to determine what conditions reduced or increased the phenomena.
Instead these test results are just listed without any suggestion of follow up procedures or experiments to isolate the cause.
A small story:
I think there is some similarity between these ganzfield tests and tests we did to attempt to solve a rarely occuring memory corruption problem. Of course just publishing a paper that described the problem was of no value to anybody. What was required was to understand the cause well enough that the problem could be prevented. And for several weeks, several of us lived and breathed this problem for hours on end as we attempted to isolate it. If this kind of thinking exists in the ganzfield experimenters it does not show up in the reports they write and for me, beyond what I think is the unlikely nature that a paranormal phenomena like this exists, this is the reason that I was skeptical of the ganzfield testing.
I was under the impression that what curious said was the way they were conducted. The transmitter views a random image and attempts to send it to the receiver. At the end of the transmission phase the receiver is shown four random images and he picks the one he thinks that the transmitter was looking at. I spent some time trying to figure out away that a non-random effect in either the images or the leanings of the transmitter could lead to a non 25% result with this procedure and couldn't see one. I know the receiver is supposed to sit there and talk about images that he thinks he's receiving but I didn't understand that this had anything to do with the test.
But even if there is somebody there that interprets what the receiver is saying and he is responsible for picking the most likely image I don't see how this can lead to a non-25% result.
My own objection to the process when I last looked at this was the great variation in test results between the experiments. If I recall correctly many tests had results wildly better than average but the overall effect was canceled out by roughly average effects in other tests. Speaking as an engineer who used to do quite a bit of testing, a wildly non-random result would have served as the basis for a very extensive investigation. Being a skeptic I would have assumed experimental error and devoted considerable time to investigating the possibility of that. Assuming I couldn't find experimental error and I still had a repeatable test I would have been driven to determine what conditions reduced or increased the phenomena.
Instead these test results are just listed without any suggestion of follow up procedures or experiments to isolate the cause.
A small story:
I think there is some similarity between these ganzfield tests and tests we did to attempt to solve a rarely occuring memory corruption problem. Of course just publishing a paper that described the problem was of no value to anybody. What was required was to understand the cause well enough that the problem could be prevented. And for several weeks, several of us lived and breathed this problem for hours on end as we attempted to isolate it. If this kind of thinking exists in the ganzfield experimenters it does not show up in the reports they write and for me, beyond what I think is the unlikely nature that a paranormal phenomena like this exists, this is the reason that I was skeptical of the ganzfield testing.