ESP, TK, OBE....are very interesting concepts. Who wouldn't want to be able to perform some of the same feats as their favorite comic book characters? Unfortunately, here in reality, claims by people who apparently possess these powers are completely and utterly baseless. This is not because they have not been studied, they have been studied, at great length and cost. However, zero (zilch, nada) positive observations of these phenomena have ever been seen in a controlled setting.
Unfortunately, an astounding number of people still have faith that these powers are real. Why?
Here's why:
1) Biased reporting - positive experience are always reported (ie. some guy says that he dreamt that JFK was going to be assasinated, JFK gets assasinated, everyone says 'Hey, ESP must be real!'), negatives are ignored (ie. the fact that some didn't dream that JFK was going to be assasinated will never make the news). This is also known as "confirmation bias", people tend to remember positive hits and ignore negative hits to support their favorite beliefs.
2) Will to believe - there is of course the effect of wishful thinking. People, in general, desire predictability and control over their surroundings to comfort them (ie. OBEs tend to suggest the presence of a soul and therefore support the idea of an afterlife, easing our greatest fear, death). Therefore they are much more willing to believe in such phenomena in hopes of of attaining just that much more control over their situation.
3) Everyday experience - Everyday, people observe what they believe to be strange or even impossible coincidences. However, all of these 'coincidence' are completely statistically explainable. Here's a good article to help articulate my point:
Miracle on Probability Street
The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America
By Michael Shermer
Because I am often introduced as a "professional skeptic," people feel compelled to challenge me with stories about highly improbable events. The implication is that if I cannot offer a satisfactory natural explanation for that particular event, the general principle of supernaturalism is preserved. A common story is the one about having a dream or thought about the death of a friend or relative and then receiving a phone call five minutes later about the unexpected death of that very person.
I cannot always explain such specific incidents, but a principle of probability called the Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials. Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.
In their delightful book Debunked! (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), CERN physicist Georges Charpak and University of Nice physicist Henri Broch show how the application of probability theory to such events is enlightening. In the case of death premonitions, suppose that you know of 10 people a year who die and that you think about each of those people once a year. One year contains 105,120 five-minute intervals during which you might think about each of the 10 people, a probability of one out of 10,512--certainly an improbable event. Yet there are 295 million Americans. Assume, for the sake of our calculation, that they think like you. That makes 1/10,512 X 295,000,000 = 28,063 people a year, or 77 people a day for whom this improbable premonition becomes probable. With the well-known cognitive phenomenon of confirmation bias firmly in force (where we notice the hits and ignore the misses in support of our favorite beliefs), if just a couple of these people recount their miraculous tales in a public forum (next on Oprah!), the paranormal seems vindicated. In fact, they are merely demonstrating the laws of probability writ large.
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