Suspension of PSI Belief
Geller’s self-titled 1977 record album
A thoughtful article by Robert McLuhan on Uri Geller is available at his Paranormalia blog. His comments sum up just what I think of Geller at present: He fools people when he needs to (which may be a lot) but has also apparently demonstrated truly unexplainable abilities from time to time. The fact that he does engage in sleight-of-hand is reason one for fundamentalist skeptics to dismiss all of his claims, even though he has demonstrated strange abilities in lab settings more than once. Can he fool scientists? Of course, but ALL of them?
A few years ago, I got into a discussion about Geller with my friend, cyberpunk author John Shirley. John was surprised that I accepted Geller’s “flimflammery” as genuine. I cited a book entitled The Geller Papers, which contains a wealth of articles on Geller by scientists and even magicians, some of whom were not ready to dismiss Geller out of hand. John said that the scientists were probably in collusion with Geller, or fooled by him.
I am not aware of any controlled study which examines reported instances of metal continuing to bend after Geller has finished touching it, or indeed after he has left the premises. In any case, I prefer to leave the Geller question open.
Adding to the strange soup is the fact that Geller said he had been contacted in the early 1970s by an alien entity called SPECTRA which relayed messages to him through a supercomputer that was orbiting the Earth–shades of the contactees and of course Phillip K. DIck’s VALIS experience. He also claimed UFO sightings from a very young age.
Early in his career, his American compatriot Dr. Andrija Puharich claimed so many bizarre occurrences with Geller that there was really no hope of convincing anyone in the academic community or the mainstream media of anything connected with the psychic. Puharich has been accused of colluding with Geller to sell some sort of scheme to addle-headed new agers, but the project never materialized, even after Puharich wrote a book about his experiences. He also arranged for Geller to be tested at respectable laboratories. The real story behind all this weirdness remains to be told, although Colin Wilson made a stab at it in his 1981 book, The Unexplained.
Link to McLuhan’s post via The Anomalist.
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May 05 2009 
May 6th, 2009 at 1:07 am
Geller fails the Banachek test. that is, if a skilled magician can do the same things, we haven’t got an anomaly.
Some time ago (1979?), the young Banacheck fooled scientists under “controlled” conditions into believing he had psychic powers, when in fact he was just a very gifted illusionist. He could do both the Ingo Swann and the Uri Geller tricks. Ultimately, he held a press conference and revealed his trickery. Banacheck is today perhaps the top mentalist in the world, and thinks Uri Geller is a fraud. Three other great illusionists I can think of immediately: Derren Brown (I recommend Brown’s book, “Tricks of the Mind”), Criss Angel, and Jamy Ian Swiss - all believe Geller is 100% fake.
When Johnny Carson asked Geller to bend cutlery straight out of the commissary on national television, he refused (he couldn’t). Targ and Puthoff, who “tested” Geller, were laser physicists with no training in testing with human subjects, and a willful naivete about how they could be deceived.
I am not aware of anything Geller actually is documented doing that the better magicians can’t duplicate. So, where’s the hard evidence? Without it, anyone who even wasting any more bandwidth on Geller or his ilk. Saying that he is sometimes a charlatan but also has psychic powers smacks of Special Pleading.
May 6th, 2009 at 2:56 am
The Carson bit used to be on YouTube. The look on Geller’s face when Carson presents him with a table full of substituted props is quite priceless.
But hey, how many alien contactees/psychics get their own QVC jewelry line?
Uri must be doing something right, eh?
May 6th, 2009 at 3:31 am
Uri has demonstrated real abilities. You can go here
http://site.uri-geller.com/en/scientific_paranormal
to get a sense of some of the research done on Uri, but hey,if you want to come to a conclusion based on a episode of Johnny Carson and what Randi says more power to you.
May 6th, 2009 at 3:39 am
By the way, Uri has a part of his website titled
http://site.uri-geller.com/en/what_magicians_say
that you might find informative.
“The essential difference between a magician’s performance and a properly conducted laboratory experiment is that in magic (a) the magician is in control, (b) the product, if it is to be effective, is an illusion, and (c) the object is entertainment. In a scientific experiment, (a) the experimenter must be in control, (b) the product, if successful, is a discovery, and (c) the object is truthful knowledge.” “I have failed to conceive of any means of deception in the static PK tests with Geller, nor have magicians I have consulted.”
William. E. Cox, (Institute of Parapsychology, Durham, North Carolina - USA and Member Society of American Magicians and ASPR.)
May 6th, 2009 at 6:49 am
The problem of Uri Geller often gets protrayed as symptomatic of the larger issue of whether “psi” exists. Harvard Medical School regularly proves “psi” is real yet so-called sceptics (the Randians, etc.) ignore this hard science research. James Randi personally attacked qigong master Chunyi Lin, a former student of qigong master Yan Xin, without Randi knowing anything about Chunyi Lin, even though qigong master Chunyi Lin works with the Mayo Clinic, the top Western hospital.
When Harvard Medical School tests qigong master Yan Xin, for example, and the results are published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Neuroscience then psi has been proven. The results have been replicated in several peer-reviewed western journals with several different studies. External qi transforms physical reality — the structure of cells, dna, metal, etc.
I would urge interested researchers to consider psi from the perspective of nonwestern body transformation techniques — i.e. full-lotus alchemy, as is practiced for yan xin qigong.
Below are two studies, the second focused on the exact type of telekinetic transformation of metal, matter, etc., supposedly done by Uri Geller (who knows?) again published in a western peer-reviewed hard science journal.
You can’t fake the full-lotus!
Cancer Prevention Research 1 (7 Supplement), A16, November 1, 2008. doi: 10.1158/1940-6207.PREV-08-A16
© 2008 American Association for Cancer Research
Abstract A16: External Qi of Yan Xin Qigong induces apoptosis in estrogen-independent breast cancer cells through inhibition of the Akt/NF-B pathway
Xin Yan, Hua Shen, Hongjian Jiang, Dan Hu, Chengsheng Zhang, Jun Wang and Xinqi Wu
Chongqing Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chongqing, China, New Medical Science Research Institute, New York, NY, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Citation Information: Cancer Prev Res 2008;1(7 Suppl):A16.
Yan, X., Lin, H., Li, H., Traynor-Kaplan, A., Xia, Z., Lu, F., Fang, Y., & Dao, M. (1999).
Structural and property changes in certain materials influenced by the external qi of qigong.
Materials Research Innovations, 2, 349–359.
May 6th, 2009 at 10:34 am
IMHO, Geller is the psychic equivalent of the Santilli autopsy film.
There might be more to the story than the evident frauds… but who the fuck cares by now?
PS: Didn’t Geller accept a Magicians’ award recently?
May 6th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
“Can he fool scientists? Of course, but ALL of them?”
I doubt he has seen ALL of them.
May 6th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
No one seems to want to take the time to read the Geller Papers link I provided. I meant all the scientists who have tested him, some of whom were convinced that something was going on which was not due to trickery. I don’t know how anyone could assume that I believed that Geller would see every scientist in the world. Sophistry. If anyone wants to critique every paper published about Geller, or point me to some valid criticism, I’d be very interested.
Can magicians reproduce everything Geller has done, including bends in metal that are held by others? If so, I’d like to see the source.
Incidentally, I was going to link an essay by Eldon Byrd on Geller’s apparent ability to bend an unbendable wire made of a compound dubbed “nitinol,” but after reading an essay by Martin Gardner (bet you didn’t think I read the skeptical literature, did you?) I accepted that there was room for fraud, and decided against it.
In the actual Geller Papers book, there is another study by a researcher who placed the nitinol wires in sealed glass tubes and gave them to Geller. He was able to bend the wires without touching them, and they were only in his presence during the experiment. I don’t know how fraud is acceptable as an explanation in that case, unless you want to blame the researcher.
I said that the question was “open” with me, not solved. Embarrassments, magic tricks, and the inability to perform on demand does not rule everything else false, at least to me, although it may for a lot of people. I am quite willing to change my mind about Uri Geller, it’s just that I haven’t seen explanations of all of his purported feats by people who claim no “psychic powers.”
May 6th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
What astonishing _courage_, Mr. Bishop!
It takes real stone to walk to the edge of the precipice, actually regard the expanse revealed, then report back with such convincing, forthcoming, and compelling honesty.
I admire, hugely, the way you will not reflexively accept a premise propounded by the angrily anxious as a default starting point for, even, _reluctant_ discussion on these twitchy issues.
No, I’m not a Geller fan; I haven’t remotely studied him, read his book, or (wow) listened to his album. …Don’t know him from bunny pants. Indeed the only thing I know about him at all is superficial trivia… and how badly he is detested and reviled by canted klasskurtxians, bowdlerizing skepti-bunkies, and serial CSIcopians!
_These_ are the culprits of any interest I’d have in Geller, see? Do they know they do that: that the “harder they squeeze the more star systems slip through their fingers”? [g]. I digress.
It remains that you have integrity, consistency, and the courage already mentioned. You are a mote of relative stability in a turbulent world of ready cant, paranormal bias, and myopic spin. Hard road!
…I suspect you won’t let any of this compromise your humility, eh?
Sincerely, well done, Sir!
alienview@roadrunner.com
> http://www.AlienView.net
>> AVG Blog — http://alienviewgroup.blogspot.com/
>>> U F O M a g a z i n e — http://www.ufomag.com
May 7th, 2009 at 11:15 am
“No one seems to want to take the time to read the Geller Papers link I provided”
They are not scientific or laboratory grade reports, they journalistic reports and anecdotes. There is no science to be found in those papers.
“I don’t know how anyone could assume that I believed that Geller would see every scientist in the world. Sophistry”
Naturally all the scientists that Geller agreed to see would speak of him favorably because all the scientists that Geller didn’t agree to see didn’t ever have the chance to speak unfavorably of him.
“Can magicians reproduce everything Geller has done?”
A better question is, can magicians reproduce everything that every other magician has ever done? The answer is, absolutely not. So it is irrelevant and can prove nothing if other magicians cannot reproduce everything Geller had done because that is not a scientific or logical test.
“I haven’t seen explanations of all of his purported feats by people who claim no ‘psychic powers’”
There is nothing to disprove where nothing has been proven to exist in the first place.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Sage,
They are not scientific or laboratory grade reports, they journalistic reports and anecdotes. There is no science to be found in those papers.
To me, the Targ/ Puthoff experiments look scientifically conducted and reported. What I am saying is that more or better work needs to be done to back up, suggest some experimental validity, or conclusively disprove the many anecdotal reports from scientifically trained observers who think that this subject deserves better research and not dogmatic rejection…or I need to find more examples or have someone point me to them.
Naturally all the scientists that Geller agreed to see would speak of him favorably because all the scientists that Geller didn’t agree to see didn’t ever have the chance to speak unfavorably of him.
You (and most likely most of the readers) are at a disadvantage because you probably don’t have a copy of the book. Not all of the scientists Geller saw were impressed that he was performing anything but magic tricks or at least they could not rule out fraud. These reports are contained in the Geller Papers book, but not in the online excerpts, since those link to Geller’s site, and why would he link negative reports?
A better question is, can magicians reproduce everything that every other magician has ever done? The answer is, absolutely not. So it is irrelevant and can prove nothing if other magicians cannot reproduce everything Geller had done because that is not a scientific or logical test.
Your point is well taken. An even better question is “If it cannot be explained as a magic trick, does that mean it is definitely a (novel) magic trick?” Also, “If there is no explanation for it with current scientific theory, does that mean that it will never be scientifically verifiable, and is therefore false?” In that case, I would say it is currently unproven, but some of the reported feats of Geller deserve to be tested by different groups of researchers, using the same protocols.
This is why I continue to leave the question open. Geller is not conclusively proven as a “psychic,” but still interesting to me.
May 7th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Al L,
Thanks. No swelled head, just a curious one.
I think he is reviled by fundie skpetics because of his thirst for attention, his evident popularity, and his success with something they consider bunk. I would tend to agree with them (minus the vitriol) but for the fact that he has apparently demonstrated unexplainable feats in controlled settings.
May 7th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Disowned,
I looked up Derren Brown. I will read his book. It may have some of the answers I’m looking for with regard to Geller, even though he seems a little evangelical with the rationalist podium-pounding.
“Brown is a former evangelical Christian; he states that he became an atheist in his 20s.”
Oh dear, the fury of the converted.
I don’t see how my argument “smacks of special pleading.” It’s simply a challenge to change my mind, at least I meant it that way.
May 8th, 2009 at 10:12 am
“To me, the Targ/Puthoff experiments look scientifically conducted and reported. What I am saying is that more or better work needs to be done to back up, suggest some experimental validity, or conclusively disprove the many anecdotal reports from scientifically trained observers who think that this subject deserves better research and not dogmatic rejection…or I need to find more examples or have someone point me to them”
Absolutely, I feel the same exact way…well, except for the Puthoff experiments. I will try to make a long story short so I will just list some of the faults for the Puthoff experiments: most of the experiments should have been conducted in the blind instead of just the one, there was no control group, no hypothesis testing was stated, and they didn’t do the math required to support their conclusions (ie — they just “reasonably” assumed he “passed”). Then there is the matter of a why a plasma physicist or laser physicist would be scientifically interested in examining paranormal abilities, ie — how does this relate to laser or plasma physics?
“These reports are contained in the Geller Papers book, but not in the online excerpts, since those link to Geller’s site, and why would he link negative reports?”
Because they weren’t “negative” at all since *ALL* of them were convinced Geller had some kind of ability. The “negative” angle just adds drama.
“An even better question is ‘If it cannot be explained as a magic trick, does that mean it is definitely a (novel) magic trick?’ Also, ‘If there is no explanation for it with current scientific theory, does that mean that it will never be scientifically verifiable, and is therefore false?’ In that case, I would say it is currently unproven, but some of the reported feats of Geller deserve to be tested by different groups of researchers, using the same protocols”
Both those questions are logical fallacies. John Hynek was a victim to that fallacy. So was Phil Klass. There is no need to explain something that has never been proven to exist in the first place. There is no need to explain the existence of invisible pink elephants if no one has ever demonstrated invisible pink elephants to exist in the first place.
I’ve seen some magicians do some incredible things and it makes me want to believe in magic, but I know better. It isn’t because I don’t believe what I do see, but because of what I don’t see. Look up Cyril Takayama in Google or YouTube. Cyril is very entertaining, most other magicians can’t reproduce what he does, and science cannot explain it. Why should Geller be treated by science any different from Cyril Takayama, other then Geller says he does what he does by paranormal powers and Takayama does what he does by magic?
May 9th, 2009 at 12:19 am
Yet magic can also be explained — read the book “Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality” trans. by Charles Luk. Very detailed and if you practice it — voila. Magic.
May 9th, 2009 at 10:48 am
From John Horgan on Freeman Dyson:
Dyson conjectures that no one has produced empirical proof of psi because it occurs under conditions of “strong emotion and stress,” which are “inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures.”
May 9th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Not *ALL* magic has or can be explained, only *SOME* magic has been explained — the point still being, just because science hasn’t or cannot explain it, does not mean we cannot know for a fact it is an illusion. We know they are illusions despite the silence of science on this topic, just as much as we know that AESOP’S FABLES are not real life stories despite the silence of science on that topic too.
“Dyson conjectures…”
Conjecture is neither a researched fact nor science. First one must demonstrate the existence of PSI before being able to conjecture anything about it.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:39 am
Sage,
The Puthoff/ Targ experiments were not strictly conducted as normal research, as you point out. What made them significant is that they were one of the first instances of putting Geller in a clinical testing environment with individuals who were conversant with the scientific method. The fact that they were physicists does not necessarily preclude them from doing that sort of research. The editors of the refereed journal Nature seemed to think that it was important enough to publish the report in issue #5476.
they weren’t “negative” at all since *ALL* of them were convinced Geller had some kind of ability. The “negative” angle just adds drama.
No, some of the experiment reports contained in the book (which is what I was pointing out) were either inconclusive or negative, as I recall. The online reports (that Geller links to) are all positive. Negating a hypothesis does not “add drama,” it points up that a theory is unproven or false.
There is no need to explain something that has never been proven to exist in the first place.
In the logical scenario you present, this is true, however data continues to come in which suggests that there are issues which remain to be investigated. Are ALL UFO witnesses or people who report apparent “psychic phenomena” deluded or mistaken? I don’t think so. Perhaps I’m wrong, but if I’m not, it’s more interesting to me.
Why should Geller be treated by science any different from Cyril Takayama, other then Geller says he does what he does by paranormal powers and Takayama does what he does by magic?
Maybe Takayama is performing psychic feats and lying about it! In any case, there seems to be a backlog of information (anecdotal and otherwise) which calls for more testing under controlled conditions, such as that conducted by Dean Radin, Robert Jahn, etc.
May 13th, 2009 at 11:46 am
“The editors of the refereed journal Nature seemed to think that it was important enough to publish the report in issue #5476″
What do you mean by published? Was it in a letter to the editor, a book review, or a main article? More importantly, let us fast forward to the present and see what NATURE has to say about Uri Geller today. I did a search in NATURE for Uri Geller (see http://www.nature.com/search/executeSearch?submit=go&exclude-collections=journals_palgrave%2Clab_animal&include-collections=journals_nature%2Ccrawled_content&pag-end=26&sp-a=sp1001702d&sp-c=25&sp-x-1=ujournal&sp-sfvl-field=subject|ujournal&sp-q=uri+geller&sp-m=0&sp-p=all&sp-s=date_descending&sp-p-1=phrase), and it returns 33 articles, all of them negative. What does that tell you about important they think Uri Geller and his psychic abilities is right now? I guess that earlier article must not have made much of an impression on the scientific community.
“Negating a hypothesis does not ‘add drama,’ it points up that a theory is unproven or false”
That is so true because all it takes is one relevant contradictory fact to disprove any theory. So why would you want to believe in something that has more than one relevant contradictory fact against it as Uri Geller and his psychic powers does?
“Data continues to come in which suggests that there are issues which remain to be investigated”
There is no such “data” to be found, so my logic still stands.
“Maybe Takayama is performing psychic feats and lying about it!”
That is neither a theory, hypothesis, or a logical extension of known facts, that is an escape. Maybe everybody is lying about everything, except those who say the things you wish to be true? You can prove/disprove anything in the world you want to using that kind of logic. There is no rational reason to suspect that Takayama is lying and there most certainly no reason to suspect the existence of psychic feats in the first place, so don’t go there.
This is all so simple. If Uri Geller has psychic powers, from a proper scientific point-of-view it would be very easy to prove/disprove. First we would randomly buy a few spoons. We would put the spoons in a vise in a corner of a room. We would put Uri Geller in the opposite corner and tell him to bend the spoon using mind powers alone. There would be no statistics to lie with, there would be no ambiguity if he could bend spoons with the power of his mind, and not even the scientific community would dare to refute it. So why isn’t that happening? Because no one wants to be the first to shatter someone else’s dreams or fantasies.
May 13th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Sage,
The Targ/ Puthoff report was published as an extended letter.
All I wanted to say was that I still found Geller interesting. If you want to ascribe blind belief, dreaming, or fantasies to that attitude, have it your way. He’s just a small part of the larger enigma of psychic research that I find compelling. This is why I also mentioned Radin and Jahn in my exchange with you.
There is no such “data” to be found, so my logic still stands.
If you are referring to Geller, you may have a point, but other studies have demonstrated repeated mind-over-matter effects that are far above chance, such as those presented in Robert Jahn’s book Margins of Reality. To me, this indicates that there are effects to be studied, not “fantasies.”
I was joking about Takayama. Maybe I should have put an emoticon after the statement. It just seemed too silly to have to explain. I think that sometimes you seem to take things too literally.
My attitude is mainly one of curiosity. I try to make few conclusive judgments. The only thing I choose to believe with a fair amount of certainty is that so-called ESP or mind-over-matter effects have been demonstrated anecdotally over thousands of years, and experimentally in the last couple of hundred years.