The first scientific study to use the social messaging service, experts will investigate ‘remote viewing’ – the psychic ability to identify distant locations.
Thousands of members of the public will be asked to ‘Tweet’ their impressions of a randomly chosen spot in the UK visited by one of the researchers.
Then they will vote for which of five photographs on a website shows where the visitor was standing. The trial will be repeated with visually different locations four times.
If at the end of the experiment the votes correctly identify at least three targets, it will support the existence of extra-sensory perception.
It all starts at 3pm today so hurry and sign up to RW on twitter.
Took part in the trial of this, and intend to take part in all the formal tests too. Professor Wiseman’s commentary and blog are very interesting.
I suspect his sceptism will be strongly confirmed, as will mine, but it will be very interesting to observe the results one way or the other.
I so much wanted to be a parapsychologist when I was a kid. I’m kind of jealous of him!
*snigger*
Oh Richard Wiseman – what will you do next? Always up to such wacky scientific japes and shennanigans!
I am going to do this purely so I can say I took part in a Richard Wiseman research thing.
Hm,..i might enter too just to see and if i fail miserably then it must be bad feng shui!
Is anyone else psyched for this?
thats just silly
Ehehehe … So what proof do we have that it happens under correct rules …
From the text the experiment is not all clear to me … and also, when do they say the trial succeeded? What percentage? I mean .. it should not be the same as statistics would tell on forehand already ….
I wont participate .. I would ruin the results completely ofcourse ….
I’m good at messing up research experiments … I’m always excluded after frist checks .. I’m not standard … (yes, very good objective research it is …)
I’m getting already impressions from spots … but that’s ofcourse psychic future visions, not remote viewing .. so they will not be interesting in this experiment ..
This picture … I wont tell what it tells me … psychologists dont like being on the ‘couch’ theirselves …
anyhow .. curious how this experiment will proceed ..
It’s not silly at all. It’s an awesome idea. Social networking sites give researchers the opportunity for a HUGE amount of participants so they can do large-scale experiments like this. GO WISEMAN GO.
To SGC – too true, I’m afraid. Securing participants is always a pain in the a*se, which is why so many end up using only university students – surely not an accurate representation of the population, yet the main guinea pigs.
I love Wiseman’s stuff – it raises a fair amount of academic snobbery due to the populist nature, but I think the prejudice is unfounded. I think it’s great that he makes real science accessible and non-threatening for so many people. It’s cool to have that inviting kind of attitude and hope he keeps going for years to come.
Hayley: maybe if psychologists quite shoving people in fake prisons and pretending to electrocute them, they’d get more participants!
Just kidding, I know that stuff isn’t allowed any more, but I still wouldn’t dare go to a set physical location to be in an experiment. Online ones are much less worrying.
Feel that it’s somehow wrong that, despite the fact i am sceptical of the experiment showing anything other than random choice, i am also rather disappointed that i got it wrong today… ::) Damn my lack of psychicness…
I got it wrong too. My roommate (male, bearded) and I both picked B. Maybe we’ll unlock our innate psychic abilities in tomorrow’s trial.
Hey guys, next trial is in 30 minutes! SCIENCE!!
Awaah, ..me fataly flawed
Me too, Marie. Once again male bearded roommate and I picked the same one, and once again it was totally wrong. We’re never going to win that Randi Challenge $1,000,000 if we don’t get paranormal fast. Two more tries at it!
I failed to see the point in this experiment? The general public are not any good at remote viewing.