Knowtex

It was one of last year's most astonishing scientific stories: a leading psychology journal accepted a paper presenting evidence for precognition – an ability to perceive future events. What's more, mainstream psychologists had pored over a preprint of the paper and found no fatal flaw.

Ben Goldacre: Scientific journals can be as bad as newspapers in preferring eye-catching stories to negative findings

Last year a mainstream psychology researcher called Daryl Bem published a competent academic paper, in a well respected journal, showing evidence of precognition. Three academics have re-run three of these backwards experiments, just as Bem ran them, and found no evidence of precognition.

In a controversial paper entitled “Feeling the Future” Daryl Bem claims to have found significant statistical data in support of precognition in various situations through a series of nine experiments. Nicolas Gauvrit presents several analyses critiquing the methodology presented in Bem’s study.

Continuing what may turn into a 12-round prize fight, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers was kind enough to send me a link to his team's response to the Bem, Utts & Johnson reply.

Lots of people believe in psychic powers, but there has never been any convincing evidence for their existence.

Daryl Bem, Jessica Utts, and Wes Johnson have written a reply to the Wagenmakers et al Bayesian analysis of Bem's precognition experiments

The Thursday, January 6, 2011 edition of ABC World News with Diane Sawyer featured a segment called “Seeing the Future?”, which focused on Dr. Daryl Bem.

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology plans to publish a series of 9 experiments by Daryl Bem that purport to show evidence for precognition. This has sparked a heated discussion among psychologists and other scientists.

I'm enjoying the media furor about Daryl Bem's recent psi-research. It's always entertaining to see scientists getting hot and bothered about parapsychology.