Michael Shermer

In the following viewpoint, Michael Shermer contends that the existence of human psychic ability such as ESP has not been proven. To support his point, Shermer describes his tour of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, an organization founded to investigate ESP and other psychic powers. During his visit, Shermer volunteered to participate in a group experiment that was supposed to reveal if one had ESP. Although the testers claimed that several individuals scored “high marks” indicating that they had psychic ability, Shermer saw that the results showed nothing more than the effect of random chance. Those who peddle pseudoscience often misinterpret statistics to achieve their desired results, the author concludes. Shermer is the author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time...