How to test something based on "gut feeling"?

[RobbieGee]

First: I'm not claiming any supernatural abilities! You'll understand when you read what my "special powers" are

First, I want to provide a small anecdote which I will use as a basis for my question. It seems that my brain often is bloody good at keeping track of time. I can set the timer on the oven to, say, 20 minutes while waiting for a pizza then go watch TV. I forget about the pizza and suddenly a feeling of anxiety rushes over me as I'm reminded about the pizza and can't remember if I set the timer correctly. So I rush to the oven only to see the timer going "3...2...1...beeep beeep beeep".

I've seriously impressed friends and family at times - but it's hard to demonstrate under pressure because the feeling is indistinguishable from i.e. performance anxiety. Now, say that someone seriously claimed some power (slightly more impressive than being a lucky time-guesser ), but was at the mercy of their "gut feeling" which just didn't perform well under pressure. What would your advise be with regards to self-testing and probabilities - or any other advise you might think of (serious, please).

Now I'll just wait for a mix of replies from serious and well-thought advice, conspiracy theorists which claim that all sceptics would suppress any such results and morons who misread the entire post and thought I've made some ludicrous claim...

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

If you have made the same pizza repeatedly, you can easily develop an internal time keeper. There are many things I have done in my profession over the years (different nursing jobs) which I developed great skills in estimating time and volumes. Measure something often enough and you know by looking at it what the volume, weight or time will be without measuring.

I can tell volume by sight but that doesn't exclude other sensing mechanisms which tell me how much time has passed. I can tell where my fingers are on this key board without looking.

You might also be using unconscious cues. TV commercials for instance come at certain times and one could easily know 10 minutes had passed when the first commercial came on in a program. Darkness comes about 30 minutes after the Sun sets. The traffic noises in the background might tell you the school down the street just let out (at a certain known time), or a bus might go by on a certain schedule which you unconsciously know.

I see no reason our brains wouldn't have an internal time sense.

 

[Modified]

Now, say that someone seriously claimed some power (slightly more impressive than being a lucky time-guesser ), but was at the mercy of their "gut feeling" which just didn't perform well under pressure. What would your advise be with regards to self-testing and probabilities - or any other advise you might think of (serious, please).

Self-test repeatedly until it no longer causes stress.

 

[RobbieGee]

@skeptigirl:

I agree that our brain has an internal timer, but that wasn't my point. My example was merely meant as an illustration of something I would think is very hard to measure, but still real.

Let's say for the sake of argument that I was telepathically linked with my little sister (which I'm not, as far as I'm aware of) and could tell by a slight feeling of anxiousness whether she was thinking about bunnies or turtles (or any set of binary conditions for that matter). However, if I was too aware of "performing" for a test, the feeling I depended upon to tell me when to react would be mixed up with a feeling of nervousness to fail the test.

In this hypothetical case, what could one do to get the most reliable results?

As far as I can think of, a good method would be to have the subject being unaware of being tested and/or the subject should not be concerned with any outcome (second part added after reading Modified's response).

Regarding being conditioned to handle the stress that seems to be a good tactic, but let's throw the JREF challenge into the mix - since part of my reason for the discussion is to criticise it. I just don't think anyone can train themselves to not being nervous about having a million dollars at stake unless they're already filthy rich.

So to make it clear: my criticism is that the JREF challenge methodology would falsly dismiss legit claims that are dependant upon vague feelings. Second, and not regarding the JREF challenge, how could one go about testing such (actually legit, but unknown at the time) claims correctly using science?

 

[Squishua]

Now, say that someone seriously claimed some power, but was at the mercy of their "gut feeling" which just didn't perform well under pressure. What would your advise be with regards to self-testing and probabilities - or any other advise you might think of (serious, please).

First try to eliminate the chance that you only notice your "ability" on chance occasions (and not noticing when nothing happens). Formalize the testing and decide ahead of time what will constitute a hit and what will not. Record the results of many planned private self-tests over a period of time and analyze them yourself.

Make sure you are recording ALL self-testing attempts. With self-testing it is very easy to end up forgetting to record some of the misses, which will skew the numbers.

Do the numbers seem above chance? Way above chance? If so, check for cues you may be picking up unconciously that might be giving you information by "ordinary" means. Diligently insulate yourself from these cues and begin a new series of tests.

How are the numbers now? Still way above chance? Now it's time to involve a friend or two to witness the phenomena. Are they at a loss to explain in a non-paranormal way what they witness? Are the numbers still significantly above chance?

Now it's time to involve a skeptic or two. Someone you know, but doubts your assertions of paranormal powers. Let these people witness it. Can they offer any explanation?

Eventually the "stage fright" won't be an issue. Then when you fail the challenge you will only be left to conclude that Randi and his cohorts are powerful wizards who render all other magi impotent in their presence.

-Squish

P.S. I get that you are not making any kind of claim and are only asking a general question.

 

[NobbyNobbs]

I've worked at the same restaurant for over a year. I used a scale (and still do, to be sure), to measure out quantities. However, when I reach into the bag of frozen french fries to pull out an order, I pull out 8 oz, +/- 1/4 ounce, about 85% of the time. You just get used to it, even under pressure.

 

[RobbieGee]

"A wizard did it", huh? Myself, I like to blame the underpants gnomes, but each to his own I guess...

I'd like to add a bit of background. Regarding my example, although it is not a claim for any special powers, was the inspiration for posting here. There is a very good chance it's just a matter of percieving only the successes (it's an explanation I personally see as the most probable). What prompted my curiousity, however, was the distinct feeling and accuracy (only a few seconds of error). I can very easily understand that someone would take it as a sure sign of special abilities had they experienced it themselves. This lead me on a thought track of how I would go about testing it and, further, how one could test anything which was dependant upon some vague gut-feeling - especially if one was subjected to a strong incentive to perform well, as in the JREF challenge.

Heck, maybe I'll try actually testing it during the holidays just for fun It'd be a nice exercise in the scientific process for me. What data do you figure I should get? Obviously I need to note the time of which the test starts, how long I will be waiting and how far off I was. I should try with both familiar and unfamiliar durations - 15 minutes being the most familiar (although I stopped eating such fast-foods in january, with good results I might add). Would the unfamiliar durations count as "control" experiments? (Just trying to get my terminology correct). Of course, I should attempt to note any cues I might get as Squishy mentioned. Of course I'd only be measuring my skill (or how much I suck) at determining time passed, but hey - still fun

I should wish for one of those brain-scanner-electrode-helmet-thingamabobs and a polygraph for next christmas, I'd love to play around with such toys! I could even have made a continous graph of how parts of my brain responded as the time neared.

 

[CynicalSkeptic]

There's also Confirmation Bias to think of. How many times did you think "oh my god, the Pizza", and then see your timer still had two or three minutes to go? People tend to dismiss these 'misses', and remember the 'hits'.

Ahh, Squishua said it already.

 

[RobbieGee]

...But so important it was worth mentioning twice ;-)

But yeah, that happened today. I set a timer and guessed 5 minutes had passed when only 4:37 did and 10 minutes at an actual 10:28 (after the initial 4:37 - I was waiting for something to cook). Not very impressive

 

[Ryan O'Dine]

I think that a phenomenon which cannot be reliably evoked a sufficient percentage of the time may simply not be amenable to scientific testing.

The only example off the top of my head that might contradict this would be the search for an extremely rare animal in the wild. It may be possible to capture one after a very long and unpredictable “null” result. But this is pretty different from “capturing” a psychic phenomenon.

On the other hand, look at all the trouble folks are having trying to prove the existence of that woodpecker doohickey down south, even though it was “captured” on film. So maybe my initial statement holds to some extent even for wild animal finding.

 

[SkepticScott]

I think that a phenomenon which cannot be reliably evoked a sufficient percentage of the time may simply not be amenable to scientific testing.

A phenomenon which cannot be reliably evoked a sufficient percentage of the time may simply not exist! The first question under those circumstances should be "does it exist at all, or has the claimant fooled him/herself?" After all, how did the claimant think she/he had such an ability in the first place, if the performance is indistinguishable from chance?

 

[athon]

I used to feel I could do the same thing, when I was much younger. I then became so aware of this ability, that I thought about it whenever something was being timed. I slowly became aware of numerous situations where this didn't happen at all, and it was my introduction of the 'counting the hits' phenomena.

The challenge asks for specific claims, with the devil in the detail of it. You must state 'I know the time precisely in 60% of all situations'...or however often you can do it.

Of course, like many have claimed here, I strongly doubt this ability is paranormal. We all have an extremely good 'subconscious estimator' with practiced routines, and this is often accurate even with novel routines. If you can do it consistantly, then it might be worth looking at. If not, then as people have already said, it doesn't seem paranormal.

Glad to see you're exploring the options, though.

Athon

 

[RobbieGee]

I also think a lot of people simply wish to be special in some form. Most have some kind of talent separating us from our immediate peers, be it musical, academic or what have you. Mine is computers.

Some unfortunate ones never discover theirs however, and settle with "being normal" - or they resort to/stumble upon a false gift. What could be better than being paranormal in such a situation?

When it comes to paranormal activity or anything science has not proven yet, I've come to the conclusion that if science cannot measure it then so be it. Science is a method and has proven extremely useful time and time again. If anyone invents another method that can provide useful results, I'm all for it - but there is NO NEED to call that scientific. In my mind, that would be like starting a new rock band and calling it Metallica because they already have fans so why should we bother to get our own? "Intelligent Design", I'm looking at you!

 

[ben m]

A phenomenon which cannot be reliably evoked a sufficient percentage of the time may simply not exist!

... but it also *may* exist, and as such ought to be testable. It just requires a more careful test.

My suggestion: you're stressed out by the test conditions? Presumably you can *tell* whether you're stressed or not. You repeat the experiment multiple times, and each time you *evaluate your mental state too*. For a Zener card experiment, for example, for each card, you'd write down

a) a prediction
b) a level-of-confidence that the prediction was correct
c) your stress level, on a scale of 1 to 10
d) the number of interfering spirit voices
e) Whatever else the claimant considers to be influential.


For example, "I think the card has a star. I'd evaluate my stress level at about a 5 out of 10. I hear more-than-usual voices, and I'm about 50% sure that my power is turned on."

The tests continue until there are an agreed-upon number of trials *of the ideal type*. Then, you only analyze the applicant's performance on this good subset. The applicant can self-evaluate any way he wants: "I think the card has wavy lines, but, ooh, I'm so nervous I'm not sure." OK, discard that trial, do another one. Furthermore, you can use any correlation you want. "Once I get two right in a row, that's how I know the power is working"---fine, we'll comb through the whole data set, find each instances where the applicant got two right in a row, and consider the *subsequent* trial to be part of the "good subset". (Again, the overall trials need to go on long enough to collect a big enough *useable* set. The more conditions are applied, the harder this might be.)

If the (actually powerless) applicant wants to use stress as an easy excuse, they'll fail this test. "Oh, I got that one wrong? The diary must have been too old ... erm, no, the gold leaf on the encyclopedia ... heck, these test conditions are just so *stressful*." But an applicant with real-but-delicate powers? They'd pass. Which is the whole point.

 

[Cuddles]

Of course, like many have claimed here, I strongly doubt this ability is paranormal. We all have an extremely good 'subconscious estimator' with practiced routines, and this is often accurate even with novel routines. If you can do it consistantly, then it might be worth looking at. If not, then as people have already said, it doesn't seem paranormal.

Richard Feynman did some (fairly unscientific) experiments on this, described in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman". Basically, he noticed that when he tried to time a minute he always seemed to count to 60 in the same time, although not actually a minute. He timed several other people counting to 60 and found that everyone seems to count at a consistent rate, although everyone has their own rate. Obviously, this is not much more than just an anecdote, but from personal experience this does seem to be true, and most animals also seem to have a good sense of timing, even when external cues are removed. In fact, having a sense of time seems to have a number of evolutionary advantages, so it would be more surprising if we couldn't time ourselves fairly accurately.

Internal clocks aside, you say that you time the pizza while watching TV. Even assuming that you are not always watching the same program, advert breaks are at regular times and of regular durations, so it is fairly easy to tell the time while watching TV.

 

[Cuddles]

When it comes to paranormal activity or anything science has not proven yet, I've come to the conclusion that if science cannot measure it then so be it. Science is a method and has proven extremely useful time and time again. If anyone invents another method that can provide useful results, I'm all for it - but there is NO NEED to call that scientific. In my mind, that would be like starting a new rock band and calling it Metallica because they already have fans so why should we bother to get our own? "Intelligent Design", I'm looking at you!

This is a common argument from people who do not understand science. The scientific method is simply this :
1) Observe something happening;
2) Think of a theory that could explain the observations;
3) Make predictions of what else the theory says you should see;
4) Go to 1).

There are only two ways that something can fail to be scientific, either it cannot be observed or does not predict anything. Anything that affects the world can be observed, especially paranormal claims that always have an affect that can be detected by a human by themselves (otherwise why would they think they could do anything?). This is the trap "researchers" like PEAR fall into, they look for tiny statistical anomalies that could be explained by a common, very small psychic effect, ignoring the fact that the claims they use to justify their research are the exact opposirte - uncommon claims with large effects. This means that even if they found anything, it would be irrelevant to the claims they are trying to support.

The other way not to be scientific is not to make predictions. This is actually quite hard. If I claim to be able to move a pen with my mind, then I can predict that I can move a pencil as well. Given that these are the only ways to unscientific, I hope you can now see that anything is subject to scientific investigation, since if you can see it, you can use the scientific method. And in fact, any method that tries to explain observations and then confim it's explanation is science, so there can never be any other method.

ID is not some other method trying to call itself science, it is absolutely nothing pretending to be science. It fails to be science because it makes no predictions, or more accurately, the only prediction it makes is that if we re-ran the Earth's history without a god there would be no life, which can't be tested for obvious reasons.

 

[RobbieGee]

Re: the feynman "counting to 60" story - I just remembered that we did that in 5th grade (or thereabouts) and I was almost dead-on. I did however, practice my counting with my watch before testing, so you can decide for yourself how much faith you want to put in the results

I'm going to have to respond to the other posts later - I have a 9 hour bus ride ahead of me and need to pack my stuff :-\

 

[Kord]

I was a palm reader for around 20 years, and did readings in all kinds of venues, including a lot of corporate events, and, once, a series of Pink Floyd concerts. I never had lessons or read any books about the subject, including anything about cold reading (which at the time I hadn't heard of). But I'd always had a deep fascination with what goes on inside other people's minds, and palm reading was a good medium for getting up close with total strangers to see if I could understand a little of what made them tick.

I always told people that I didn't read futures or tell fortunes, but instead did character reading. Some would be disappointed to hear this at first, but would still stay for a reading and, from the feedback they gave me, enjoyed it anyway. Most of what I did can be explained as observation. For instance, I would watch the way a person approached me, how they sat in the chair, what they did with their eyes, etc; and, of course, the way they held out their hand when I asked to see it told me a lot.

I used to read the actual lines on the palm, and I admit there is no logic to that. All I can say is, it's remarkable there is such a wide variety of patterns to be seen; also – and again I have no logic for this – you can make readings by comparison with what you've seen before. Most of my customers were women, and while it might be easy to think that's expected, in that women could be said to be more prone to fortune-telling, I would say that in most of my cases, women wanted to listen, if only for a short while, to someone who took their essential character (as far as he was able to see it) totally seriously and with great respect. Perhaps I should also say here that although I hadn't heard of cold reading, I understood the principles behind it, and always made a point of asking the person being read not to give me any verbal clues and not answer any of my questions unless it was clear I wouldn't be able to cheat by them doing so.

Over the years, I tended to use the actual palm less and less for readings until it got to the point where I didn't really use it at all, other than as a kind of security blanket between the reader and the person being read. Obviously, I can offer no scientific evidence that my readings were accurate. All I can say is that I always put my full effort into them and that people usually remarked, without prompting, that they were very accurate.

But there was one effect I can't explain, and which might have something in common with RobbieGee's gut feeling. It happened only very rarely, and usually towards the end of an evening's reading. I would often be very tired, having met and given my full concentration to several completely different people. Someone would sit down, and perhaps half way through the reading, I would feel my mind step to one side, so to speak, and the words that next came out of my mouth were not consciously prepared by me, almost as if it was my instinct directly speaking. I should stress here that I never normally tried to guess specific details about anyone's life – simply because I knew I couldn't do it – but this instinctive voice would come out with just such statements, e.g. that the person being read had three children, two boys and a girl, or it would name their specific career. These moments of unexplained insight did not last long, and I think I was sensible enough to know when they were over and not try to prolong them. But, invariably, what I'd said at those times was right.

I'm not a believer of any kind, and certainly don't think that this sort of insight is from God or any kind of invisible entity. My theory is that perhaps the instinct/gut feeling has perceptive abilities that are more sensitive than the brain/mind's, and when we get our conscious thought processes out of the way, it's free to pick up on all sorts of normally unreadable signals.

 

[Beth]

My theory is that perhaps the instinct/gut feeling has perceptive abilities that are more sensitive than the brain/mind's, and when we get our conscious thought processes out of the way, it's free to pick up on all sorts of normally unreadable signals.

I think there is something to this, although I tend to assign it to the limbic processing system or hindbrain. This is my opinion only. It's based on a lot of reading, but I don't have the cites memorized and it's not explicit in what I've read. I also think this is what is actually occurring with a great many psychic experiences. It serves to explain a great deal about ESP (it's capriciousness for example) and allows for an naturalistic, not supernatural, explanation of what is happening although how people can pick up on things like how many children a stranger has remains unknown.

 

[Merko]

I don't find anything strange at all about the fact that the brain can keep track of time pretty well. Of course, like my biology teacher once explained when he was showing the mechanisms of the cell: "This may seem like it's some sort of machinery, but it's not really.. it's all... wet."

So it's going to be different for different people and in different situations. But definitely much better than 'chance'. And what would 'chance' be anyway in this case?

Myself, I can decide when to wake up. It doesn't always work, for example if I'm extremely exhausted. It works better if I have a good reason (a flight to catch, for example). But if I have to get up before 4AM (this would be very rare for me), chances are that I will wake up within 15 minutes before that time. And I don't constantly keep waking up all night long, either.