Hodgson on Piper

I'm going to start a series of uploading some original parapsychology work. I don't necessarily agree with everything contained in the papers/reports.





Hodgson on Piper


Hodgson 1.1

Hodgson 1.2

Hodgson 1.3

Hodgson 2.1

Hodgson 2.2

Hodgson 2.3

Hodgson 2.4

Hodgson 2.5


I'll upload additional reports/papers on Piper in future entries.

Frustrated by sloppy essays written by scientists who ought to know better

[3/21/11 Update: Click here for some, but certainly not all, of the original SPR reports on Leonora Piper]

I’m very frustrated by this piece. It cites only one paper (an analysis by Milton and Wiseman) to justify its conclusions. It projects a sense of authority and expertise. What frustrates me is that the author(s) left out a huge amount of information. The essay fails to mention the following:

* The early British and American SPR’s work with mediums (e.g. Leonora Piper, who produced intimate hits under stringent conditions, details that are left out of Martin Gardner’s “expose”, which is nothing of the sort).

* The debate between Hyman and Honorton

* The problems with Milton and Wiseman’s paper (they failed to perform a correct statistical analysis, which would have yielded a significant result; they left out a significant study that was published almost two years prior to their paper, the inclusion which would have made their analysis significant; and their analysis inappropriately mixed different types of studies). Unfortunately, Wiseman has a history of these kinds of mistakes.

* Ganzfeld analyses that were published after Milton and Wiseman’s paper (e.g. this)

* Sheldrake’s telepathy work

* EEG and fMRI correlation studies

* etc.