Thursday, January 06, 2011

Is ESP Real?
A well-respected psychology journal will soon publish evidence for the existence of ESP. The author of the paper conducted well-known memory experiments, but in reverse time.

In one classic memory experiment, for example, participants study 48 words and then divide a subset of 24 of them into categories, like food or animal. The act of categorizing reinforces memory, and on subsequent tests people are more likely to remember the words they practiced than those they did not.

In his version, Dr. Bem gave 100 college students a memory test before they did the categorizing — and found they were significantly more likely to remember words that they practiced later. “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words,” the paper concludes.
Who could argue with that?

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