Collective Consciousness - Experiments on Humans

This is in continuation of the post 'Collective Consciousness' of a couple days back:

A science journal in 2010, published claims made by Professor Daryl Bem, a physicist from Cornell University, that he had proved humans have similar psychic abilities supposedly seen in the birds and monkeys.

Professor Bem set out to investigate 'psi', or parapsychology, through a series of nine experiments.

In one test, students were shown a list of words to memorise. They were later asked to recall as many as they could and finally were given a random selection of the words to type out.

They were, unsurprisingly, more adept at remembering certain words over others, but these words tended to be the words they would later be asked to type, suggesting a future event had affected their ability to remember.

In another experiment, the students were shown an image of two curtains on a computer screen and told one concealed an erotic picture. The students chose the curtain hiding the picture ‘more often than could be explained away by chance’, according to Professor Bem.

Importantly, the position of the picture was randomly assigned by a computer that didn't make its decision until after the volunteer chose one curtain or the other.

This suggested the students were actually influencing future events and the odds against the combined result being down to mere chance or being a statistical fluke were quoted as 74 billion to one.

Professor Bem carried out nine different experiments involving more than 1,000 volunteers and all but one came down on the side of these so-called psychic theories.

Elsewhere, scientist Rubert Sheldrake has created experiments that test this collective consciousness and telepathy theory online and over the phone. 

He believes it can’t be coincidence that hundreds, if not thousands of people, around the world experience similar feelings of being watched, for example. 

Yet many are sceptical. In regards the Japanese monkeys, author Ron Amundson dismissed the supernatural claims, instead suggesting it was impossible to know for certain the monkeys in different groups had never met. 

He added human intervention may have played a part in the skill developing because the monkeys had not seen, or learnt to wash the potatoes, before they were given them by the scientists.

It is also thought that monkeys don’t share a collective consciousness but instead all have thought processes and brains that solve problems in the same way.

This was also used to explain the blue tit mystery; the birds wanted milk, they looked at the bottles and solved the problem they were facing.

Then in 2012, researchers from Edinburgh University including Professor Stuart Ritchie, wanted to put Professor Bem’s claims about the human psyche to the test and challenge his findings.

They repeated Professor Bem’s experiments, using the same computer program, but were unable to repeat his results. 

‘We found nothing,’ said Ritchie. ‘It might just be because the statistics were a fluke. You're going to get some false positives sometimes.’

Yet Professor Ritchie was unable to explain exactly why his results were so widely different. Professor Bem claimed at the time that Ritchie’s scepticism may have skewed the results, but Ritchie later denied this.

Thought provoking stuff, right?...at this point, raises more questions than provides answers, but then they are fascinating questions for sure!