home | what's new | other sites | contact | about

Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Dr. Gary Schwartz:

scientifically testing the authenticity of psychic-mediums

Return to Afterlife main-page

Dr. Schwartz's official website

A long time ago, in a college class, I recall Art Mokarow's bold statement that "80% in any field are incompetent."

At the time, as a young man, I judged this assessment as too harsh. Today, however, at age 70+, I think he was being too generous. It is extremely difficult to find a truly skilled "master of a trade" in any life-endeavor.

The field of psychic-mediums is no different. I've interacted with quite a few, and I would say that most have no business promoting themselves as such. That said, there are a few who are so good that they will knock your proverbial socks off with what they know; that is, what they've been given to know by invisible Spirit Guides.

In his book, The Afterlife Experiments, Dr. Gary Schwartz investigated, under controlled laboratory conditions, the abilities of psychic-mediums. As an extra filtering precaution, he employed not just "double blind" rigor, but "triple blind."

For example, double-blind experiments are often used to test new medicinal drugs. In these tests, some of the pills will be placebos; that is, without medicinal properties - just a sugar pill. The test would be termed "double-blind" if neither the patient nor the administering doctor had knowledge concerning the nature of the pills; i.e., authentic or placebo.

Concerning psychic-mediums, a common criticism is that of the "cold reading." It is alleged that the medium gathers information about and from the sitter via body-language, questions asked, comments made, facial expressions, subtle cues, and the like, to create a "message."

In an effort to circumvent any such charges, Dr. Schwartz designed an experiment whereby "cold reading" would be impossible.

To that end, and to ensure a high degree of credible result, Dr. Schwartz decided upon "triple-blind" testing procedure; that is:

• the sitter is "blind" - not present when a reading is given, and would not even see the psychic-medium or have any information;
• the psychic-medium is "blind" - would not see the sitter or have any information;
• the experimenter, the one coordinating the test, is "blind" - in that, he or she is not given definitive knowledge regarding the participants.

Knowing even this much about the experiment, we already sense the effectiveness of, the difficulty imposed by, these restrictions; however, in actual practice, it was even a little more complicated.

For a complete survey of the details, I would direct you to Dr. Schwartz's book, The Afterlife Experiments; also, his several Youtube lectures on this subject.

The conclusion?

Some of the mediums failed the test; some were so-so; but a few of them, such as John Edward, succeeded amazingly and brilliantly! - with probability of "pure chance" orchestrating results in the realm of billions to one! - leaving little doubt, for the rational, objective seeker-of-truth, that there are, in fact, scientifically authenticated psychic-mediums.