Sherman Bay
Master Poster
Hmmm...reminds me of a perpetual motion developer...if I could only reduce the friction to this overbalance wheel, it would run forever, just as I prophesied...just a little more time and I'll have it...
Dr. Colin Ross's challenge
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Colin Ross
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50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology
Lilienfeld Lynn et al (2010). 50 Great Myths in Popular Psychology pp. 33-36.
"Myth #4 Visual Perceptions Are Accompanied by Tiny Emissions from the Eyes"
The authors refer to the Winer papers I included with my original Challenge submission. They write:
"Before reading on, take a look at the world around you. If you're inside, fixate on an object, like a chair, pen, or coffee mug; if you're outside, fixate on a tree, blade of grass, or cloud. Keep staring at it."
"Now answer this question: Is anything coming out of your eyes?"
"This question may strike you as decidely odd. Yet surveys demonstrate that large proportions of adults believe that our visual perceptions are accompanied by tiny emissions from our eyes (Winer, Cottrell, Gregg, Fournier, & Bica, 2002)."
"More recently, psychiatrist Colin Ross claimed that he can harness beams from his eyes to turn on a tone from a computer. Nevertheless, preliminary testing by a neurologist revealed that Ross' eyeblinks created a brain wave artifact that was inadvertently triggering the tone (False Memory Syndrome Foundation, 2008)."
"Research suggests that presenting college students with "refutational" messages, those designed not merely to explain how the eye works but how it doesn't work, in this case that the eye doesn't emit rays or particles, leads to short-term reductions in extramission beliefs (Winer at al., 2002)."
This seems like a clear explicit statement that the eyes do not emit rays or particles of any kind. Visual perception is not accompanied by anything coming out of the eyes, according to Lilienfeld.
In addition to the proposition that no particles of any kind come out of the eyes, there is a secondary proposition that therefore no emanations of any kind play a role in visual perception.
Yet, various posts on this forum affirm that of course EM signals (rays or particles) come out of the eyes. So which is it? "the eye doesn't emit rays or particles" or it does?
Also, a side point, the "preliminary testing by a neurologist" was Steven Novella watching a video of me demonstrating the initial protocol that was posted on line - I told the JREF about this posting and told the JREF that I had concluded the tone was triggered by eyeblink artifact prior to the video being viewed by Steven Novella.
Lilienfeld Lynn et al (2010). 50 Great Myths in Popular Psychology pp. 33-36.
"Myth #4 Visual Perceptions Are Accompanied by Tiny Emissions from the Eyes"
The authors refer to the Winer papers I included with my original Challenge submission. They write:
"Before reading on, take a look at the world around you. If you're inside, fixate on an object, like a chair, pen, or coffee mug; if you're outside, fixate on a tree, blade of grass, or cloud. Keep staring at it."
"Now answer this question: Is anything coming out of your eyes?"
"This question may strike you as decidely odd. Yet surveys demonstrate that large proportions of adults believe that our visual perceptions are accompanied by tiny emissions from our eyes (Winer, Cottrell, Gregg, Fournier, & Bica, 2002)."
"More recently, psychiatrist Colin Ross claimed that he can harness beams from his eyes to turn on a tone from a computer. Nevertheless, preliminary testing by a neurologist revealed that Ross' eyeblinks created a brain wave artifact that was inadvertently triggering the tone (False Memory Syndrome Foundation, 2008)."
"Research suggests that presenting college students with "refutational" messages, those designed not merely to explain how the eye works but how it doesn't work, in this case that the eye doesn't emit rays or particles, leads to short-term reductions in extramission beliefs (Winer at al., 2002)."
This seems like a clear explicit statement that the eyes do not emit rays or particles of any kind. Visual perception is not accompanied by anything coming out of the eyes, according to Lilienfeld.
In addition to the proposition that no particles of any kind come out of the eyes, there is a secondary proposition that therefore no emanations of any kind play a role in visual perception.
Yet, various posts on this forum affirm that of course EM signals (rays or particles) come out of the eyes. So which is it? "the eye doesn't emit rays or particles" or it does?
Also, a side point, the "preliminary testing by a neurologist" was Steven Novella watching a video of me demonstrating the initial protocol that was posted on line - I told the JREF about this posting and told the JREF that I had concluded the tone was triggered by eyeblink artifact prior to the video being viewed by Steven Novella.
dropzone
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Good lord, you are citing MORE people who dismiss your claims as NONSENSE as SUPPORTING YOU?!?!?
I withdraw all my suggestions that you are running a con. You have demonstrated you are completely insane and we should contact your local board with this evidence to ask that your licence be revoked before you ruin more lives with your delusions.
I withdraw all my suggestions that you are running a con. You have demonstrated you are completely insane and we should contact your local board with this evidence to ask that your licence be revoked before you ruin more lives with your delusions.
not daSkeptic
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Where in what you quoted does Lilienfeld say that?
dropzone
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Y'know, I will cast myself back 30 years and, as a computer geek, again object to the use of "daemons" to describe non-corporeal, and non-electronic, nor non-code-if-real-ish....Perhaps the daemons have finally gotten to him.
Yeah, it probably wasn't daemons. (I still have Cookie Monster code laying around, if some virus writer wants to go Old Skool.)
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I recall Doom having the text "Daemon loading" when starting, apart from that you have lost me.
It appears that Ross is on a completely different plane.
Roma
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Yes Dr.Colin Ross doesn't seem to grasp the difference between people supporting him and people not supporting him, they are all in his mind supporting him.
For example: Dr.Bodkin wrote and provided a legal affidavit in support of my lawsuit against Dr.Colin Ross however Dr.Colin Ross continualy defends himself by refering to Dr.Bodkin's work.
Every time Ross does this I write to him and try to explain that Bodkin wrote an affidavit
against you not for you.
Example, Bodkin's letter states in his support for my medical malpractice lawsuit against Dr.Colin Ross:
http://sites.google.com/site/memoryabuse/dr-bodkins-letter
"First, it is my opinion that Ms Hart recieved grossly inappropriate pharmopharmacologic treatment, well below the standard of care.
.....In addition to prescribing excessive and dangerous doses of drugs with no established efficacy...."
But from Ross' comment at the end of Doug Mesner's article:
http://www.process.org/discept/2010...y-the-supernatural-and-malpractice-most-foul/
"You should look up the paper by Alexander Bodkin in which he gave 80 mg of lorazepam per day to his patients – I can give you the reference if you can’t find it. "
Dropzone I don't know what type of problem Dr.Colin Ross suffers from but the Medical Licensing Boards need to explain why Ross is not under investigation. He does seem both mentally and morally impaired.
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Ririon
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I am not a psychiatrist, and I try to avoid playing one on the Internet. But clearly, the person writing as Colin Ross in this forum should not be in a position where he is responsible for other people's health.
He busts his own theory every night by turning on the lights to see.
If right, he could easily win the 1M$ with a simple experiment demonstrating the sense of being stared at. Without tin foil and electronics.
And the whole thing about twisting the quotes to imply that perfectly normal things are "disallowed"? What is that all about? Randi will never fall for that, since he will (and has) consulted the relevant experts for claims that are outside his area of expertise. So what if an application has been accepted based on some weird paranormal-sounding wording. If nothing paranormal can be demonstrated, it will not even get to the preliminary stage.
On the off chance that saying things again in slightly different words will make any difference:
Yes, of course electromagnetic radiation comes out of the eyes, nose, ears, scalp, wherever. Come to think of it, electromagnetic radiation comes out of some more body parts, too... All of them, actually. And no, it is not "disallowed". In fact, demonstrating that NO electromagnetic radiation comes out of the eyes IS a paranormal claim, since for that to happen, the eyes would have to be cooled to absolute zero and be shielded by infinite amounts of none-radioactive lead.
No, of course this is not how sight works. And this is why your quotes say there are no rays/extramissions/emanations coming out of the eyes in relation to sight. This does not contradict the previous obvious point.
If you actually believe in some sort of extramission having an effect, why not just test that. The goggles have failed, you seem to agree somewhat to that.
You could build a sensor that goes off if anybody stares at it from a few meters away. That would be awesome, but as it goes against what I know about human physiology I don't think it would work. And if it fails, it just shows that you have failed to build such a detector, and you would have to try again.. And again.. This will not help your mental health unless you are spectacularly right and also a brilliant electronics engineer. Nothing so far indicates that.
What I suggest you do is to do a relatively simple test to see if there is such a thing as a sense of being stared at. I am sure many people here would be very helpful in getting the test protocol right. If you are dedicated to this, I suggest especially getting fls/Linda involved with the statistics part, to make sure that you have a good chance of detecting even a small effect. And everybody else will help you avoiding the false positives.
You then have two outcomes: You either have an excellent protocol to take to the JREF among others. Fame, fortune, whatever. OR you have shown to yourself that there is no extramission beam effect of any remotely useful size, and you can move on and do something more productive. Or at least different.
Jeff Corey
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There is no "secondary proposition" whatsoever. Lilienfeld et al. addressed the myth that visual perception is accompanied by emissions from the eyes. In other words, visual perception does not depend upon such emissions. They did not talk about heat, EEG or other emissions which can occur in the absence of any visual percept.
dropzone
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computer_software)I recall Doom having the text "Daemon loading" when starting, apart from that you have lost me.
"In Unix and other computer multitasking operating systems, a daemon is a computer program that runs in the background, rather than under the direct control of a user; they are usually initiated as background processes."
ETA: http://uanr.com/articles/virus.html
"One of the earliest well-known virus-like programs was the "Cookie Monster" program which ran on PDP series minicomputers. This program would run undetected in the background, and occasionally halt the currently running program and display a message requesting a cookie. If the user then typed the word "cookie," the Cookie Monster program would go back to sleep and the user’s program would continue.
"This program did not reproduce or spread, but was one of many prank programs manually loaded on computers at colleges and universities, as was the custom of programming hackers at that time. Most of these programs were harmless, but some of them (Trojans) were often employed to steal passwords from unsuspecting users."
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Colin Ross
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The goggles already show a physiologically active signal with no physical contact of the active electrode with the body, and with no eyelid movement occuring. The researchers at the University of Surrey already take an EKG from a meter away. They are mainstream grant-funded professors of electrical engineerring publishing in mainstream physics journals. I'd say it's just a matter of time and development of electrode and software technology until an EKG can be taken from even further away and an electrical device can be activated from a distance by looking at it.
It looks like we will continue to disagree about what Lilienfeld, Schrodinger, Winer, and Toulmin are saying - I read it as nothing comes out of the eyes, including no rays or particles, and no "brooms" of any kind. No matter what metaphor or more technical sounding vocabulary is used, nothing comes out. That's what they are saying, plus they are saying that nothing coming out of the eyes participates in visual perception (the theory of extramission), and, additionally, the sense of being stared at, mixing of gazes, communicating emotions and other superstitions are all impossible because nothing comes out of the eyes. Repeating our disagreement further doesn't seem productive at this point.
It looks like we will continue to disagree about what Lilienfeld, Schrodinger, Winer, and Toulmin are saying - I read it as nothing comes out of the eyes, including no rays or particles, and no "brooms" of any kind. No matter what metaphor or more technical sounding vocabulary is used, nothing comes out. That's what they are saying, plus they are saying that nothing coming out of the eyes participates in visual perception (the theory of extramission), and, additionally, the sense of being stared at, mixing of gazes, communicating emotions and other superstitions are all impossible because nothing comes out of the eyes. Repeating our disagreement further doesn't seem productive at this point.
blobru
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Hey, cool! It happens I know the brother of one of the authors of 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology (cited as "et al" above -- the late Barry L Beyerstein). As they worked together and corresponded frequently on academic matters, it should be very easy to clear up all this ambiguity surrounding what is meant by "extramission": the eye doesn't emit rays of any kind, versus the eye doesn't emit rays that aid in vision.
Hope to be talking to him as early as this afternoon. Will let you know what he says.
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I'm giving up on following this. It seems to me that Dr. Ross is interested more in obfuscation and nitpicking than producing evidence of a paranormal event.
I find it difficult to muster sufficient enthusiasm for the inevitable outcome to endure all the bickering.
Good luck, Dr. Ross.
I find it difficult to muster sufficient enthusiasm for the inevitable outcome to endure all the bickering.
Good luck, Dr. Ross.
Ivor the Engineer
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Similar technology is already available and uses video cameras. For example, in SciAm last month there was an interesting article using such technology to stabilise an image on a subject's retina to allow the person to see the 'impossible' red-green and blue-yellow hues.
Then you have (deliberately?) misunderstood the context of what you read.
Given what is known about the human brain and eye it would be paranormal if the eyes blocked EEG signals from being picked up by a suitably sensitive detector placed in front of them.
Colin Ross
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Thanks Dallas Dad. I am ready for the preliminary test by the JREF. I agree that the discussion ssems to be winding down with everyone having said just about everything they have to say.
Do you actually read any of the comments here?
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
Ririon
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No you are not.
You need an actually paranormal claim.
AND you need a finished mutually agreed upon protocol.
not daSkeptic
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Who said anything about the active electrode? That's not the only relevant factor in the system, but you wouldn't know that because you don't know what you're doing, do you?
I assume you're referring to Harland, et. al., whose work you cited earlier? Had you actually read their research you would know two things. First, it involved no physical contact whatsoever. There were no reference or ground leads connected to the subject. It was 100% wireless. Second, it was the university of Sussex, not the University of Surrey.
You were asked to identify where they said this, but thus far you have not done so. Your continued evasion just hurts your position.
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