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Anyone know about Dr. Dick Bierman?

Bierman's quite an interesting guy. He's been working in parapsychology for years, and has done quite a bit of ganzfeld work. He's written a couple of nice debunking papers, most impressively about Sheldrake's staring experiments, and how the results Sheldrake got were probably due to a simple guessing technique and an imbalance in the "random" patterns used. He's certainly someone I pay attention to, even if I don't necessarily agree with his conclusions. I'm looking forward to the paper.
 
If Chopra is touting it, it's quite possibly a benign report that has been entirely misconstrued, mined, and selectively quoted, etc.
 
Ersby said:
Bierman's quite an interesting guy. He's been working in parapsychology for years, and has done quite a bit of ganzfeld work. He's written a couple of nice debunking papers, most impressively about Sheldrake's staring experiments, and how the results Sheldrake got were probably due to a simple guessing technique and an imbalance in the "random" patterns used. He's certainly someone I pay attention to, even if I don't necessarily agree with his conclusions. I'm looking forward to the paper.
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Wow, that's not the impression I got reading this article Deepak linked:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/li...ogy.html?in_article_id=452833&in_page_id=1965

I gave the article a read and looked for The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science.
http://skeptically.org/skepticism/id1.html

The first warning sign is that the discovery is pitched directly to the media.

And what do we find in the article? This brief paragraph:
For the results - released exclusively to the Daily Mail - suggest that ordinary people really do have a sixth sense that can help them 'see' the future.
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The third sign is that the scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection. This sign is also there in the article:

Bierman looked inside the brains of volunteers using a hospital MRI scanner while he repeated Dr Radin's experiments….
Although extremely complex, and with each analysis taking weeks of computing time, he has run the experiments twice involving more than 20 volunteers.
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The forth sign is the use of anecdotal evidence. And if you read the article you'll see plenty of that with no hint of all the things that go wrong with anecdotal evidence.
 
This has been covered three times now with not one thread giving a link to the actual scientific experiment behind the Daily Mail article.

First rule of critical thinking - always go to the primary source:

http://m0134.fmg.uva.nl/publications/2002/fmri.presentiment.pa2002.doc

A 2002 paper, so I expect he'll be submitting one to peer-review which may have more results. Very exciting since it is another conceptual replication of presentiment.

So there's the basic experimental design. Lets see some real criticism please, without the ad hominem.
 
Ersby said:
An article that wasn't written by Bierman. I'll wait for the paper to be published.
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hooray, at least there one person here who can tell the difference between bad journalism and scientific research.
 
davidsmith73 said:
This has been covered three times now with not one thread giving a link to the actual scientific experiment behind the Daily Mail article.
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Link them.

First rule of critical thinking - always go to the primary source:

http://m0134.fmg.uva.nl/publications/2002/fmri.presentiment.pa2002.doc

A 2002 paper, so I expect he'll be submitting one to peer-review which may have more results. Very exciting since it is another conceptual replication of presentiment.

So there's the basic experimental design. Lets see some real criticism please, without the ad hominem.
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What ad hominem?

Thanks for the link. It's easier to do this research with the help of people who know where to dig this stuff up. This may have been covered three times here before but I wouldn't know where to find those threads. Is there a search feature anywhere on this forum? I didn't see it.

I plan to do something on my blog about this:
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/

Your help will be noted.
 
davidsmith73 said:
This has been covered three times now with not one thread giving a link to the actual scientific experiment behind the Daily Mail article.

...

So there's the basic experimental design. Lets see some real criticism please, without the ad hominem.
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Are you saying we should repeat our criticisms from the past three threads?

Please, I'm tired.
 
Ersby said:
Thanks.

I found this paper that discusses how much of an effect expectation bias could have on his 2002 results
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Great paper.

Although I haven't read it thoroughly, it seems expectation bias is a probable cause if arousal levels are not pooled across subjects before an average is calculated. If means are calculated after pooling across subjects then the expectation bias is "extremely small". According to this paper, most published presentiment experiments calculate means after pooling.

I do think the authors are a bit over cautious though. Ok, they have demonstrated that an expectation bias, although very small, is very likely to exist within the real experimental data. And because of that, they say that statistical analyses of real data is "very difficult or impossible to perform". I presume this is because it is very difficult to calculate the precise contribution of the expectation bias to a statistically significant result. But surely, if the expectation bias is extremely small and the real presentiment effect relatively larger, then we could safely assume that the bias did not contribute to the results. Thats just my view on things but I am no statistician.

Interestingly, in the discussion section they mention an alternative experimental design proposed by James Spottiswoode that would get round the bias. I believe Spottiswoode has now done an experiment using this design with Edwin May using acoustic stimuli and got positive results. Think its this one:

http://www.lfr.org/LFR/csl/library/MPZjacm.pdf

Who says parapsychologists don't respond to criticism :)

I hope that Biermans next paper on fMRI presentiment will address these expectation bias problems.
 
Wasn't paying attention, sorry, will look at the PDF when I have time. (Right now all I have time for is flaming, apparently.) I hope it explains it better than "we showed people pictures, some of them horrible, and then some people started to react right before we showed them more pictures."
 
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