Transcript 59: Medium Experiment (Part 1), Janice Ervin
Listen to interview (MP3 39:19min, 18MB)
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“I’m just as curious to see what the results show. I know that I see examples everyday. I see it in my work, I see it at my events. I see it with the attendees, when the mediums are there and they’re giving them unbelievable, evidential, information, one piece right on top of another. So, I’m extremely curious to see how this rolls out.” — Janice Ervin
Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
On this episode, I want to update you on the medium experiment we’ve been working on. Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with this experiment, of course we’re trying to find out if psychic mediums can really talk to the deceased. This last week, I had the chance to talk to Dr. Steven Novella from the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe show about the collaboration on this experiment we’ve been working on and I think we’re ready to move forward.
Now this experiment has taken a long time to get off the ground. As a matter of fact, looking at my calendar, it’s been almost a year since I appeared on the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe show and we initially hatched a plan to do this research. So for those of you who don’t remember, I thought it might be useful to dig up a clip from that episode and bring up all up-to-date on what we had discussed. Here it goes.
(Start of interview with Dr. Steven Novella)
Alex: What are we going to do together, how are we going to collaborate our research together?
Steven: I think the medium research we can go forward with, I think that’s great. The easiest way to do that is I’ll select the mediums, you select the sitter or maybe several sitters, we can work out the details by e-mail.
Alex: I think we have an agreement. We’ll work out the details offline and hopefully we can move forward with this fairly quickly. I think it will be fun.
(End of interview with Dr. Steven Novella)
Alex: Alright, despite of our good intentions of moving relatively quickly, it’s been a slow process. I’m not a big believer in the “everything happens for a reason” kind of thing. But in this case, I don’t know, maybe it happened for a reason because the delay has been good in some respects; particularly in the last six months, this experiment dragged down for a little bit. At some point I realized, I really don’t know a lot about medium research and I need to learn more. So I did start reading, I started interviewing folks, brought them on Skeptiko and you’ve met some of them. One of the first people I talked to was Julie Beischel, formerly a colleague of Barry Schwartz, probably the most notable researcher in this area. Since then Julie moved on, she’s on her own at Windbridge Institute. At any rate, I spoke with Julie, learned a lot. Couple of things we learned had to do with the problem surrounding this research.
Problem number one, has to do with rater bias, and that is once you get a reading from a psychic medium and they’ve said, “Yes, I’ve read this sitter’s deceased person,” how do you know whether that reading is really accurate? One of the problems you run into is that the person who the reading is for sometimes might say it’s more accurate than it really is. Here’s a brief discussion on rater bias.
Julie: Rater bias is if you know the reading is yours, you may have a tendency to score it as either more or less accurate than it is in reality.
So, another thing that came up in my discussion with Julie, it’s a real problem for these kinds of experiments, it’s probably the number one problem that skeptics tune in to right away, and that sensory or information leakage. So here you go, you have a medium and you have a sitter - that is the person who’s trying to connect with the deceased – how do you prevent the medium form knowing things that they aren’t supposed to know? So, we chatted a little bit about that, let me play you that clip as well.
Julie: If the medium and the sitter are in the same room, obviously there’s sensory leakage even if you use a partition. As soon as the sitter says anything, the tone of voice that even if the sitter just says yes or no – like you can say “Yes,” you can say, “Yes!” It’s very different, and that gives a lot of information to the medium.
The final thing that I took away from my discussions with Dr. Julie Beischel about these experiments was that you really had to optimize the experience for the medium. You have to make them as medium-friendly as possible, and I think this is the feeling of some of the skeptical researchers. Here’s a short clip on what Julie had to say about that.
Julie: I think people fail to understand that proper research design includes optimizing the possibility of achieving positive results. If you wanted to study plant growth, you don’t put a dry seed on the bench top in the lab and then say plants can’t grow, and you know you used soil, water and sunlight, then you said they can’t grow the seed.
Now, at the same that I was talking to prominent researchers who were more or less proponents of medium research, I was also talking to skeptics. You recall that my conversation with Ben Radford from the Skeptical Inquirer, in addition into delving into psychic detectives, also talked a lot about the medium experiments. I also spoke with skeptic, Lynne Kelly, who has become somewhat of an expert in Cold Reading Techniques, that is how to use logic deduction and observation to five the illusion that you’re a psychic medium. She’s become somewhat of an expert on that, and we spoke to her on that.
But the more I dug into this research, the more I kept banging against the same question. Why so little research? The best answer that I could come up with is the simple answer; time and money. While time and money is always an issue for any scientific research, in this case, in this area, they’re particularly challenging. The time issue is particularly challenging because the patience that most universities have for supporting this kind of research is very, very short. If anyone wants to tell you that this topic is an absolutely taboo, absolutely off-limits nuclear hazard for any university, they’re either willfully ignorant or just stupid. So, this is very, very difficult research to do inside of the university. When it does creep in, it has to be done very quickly and cranked out, otherwise the forces against it will find a way to kind of snuff it out. Those forces against it aren’t just the mean, nasty skeptics, it’s just the potential exposure, public outcry for doing anything that’s the least bit outside of the mainstream. So, time and money are really factors here. The money part, obviously because no one is funding this research from the outside. You have to generate the money yourself if you want to do any of this researching. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona would give great testimony to that effect.
Now, the more I thought about these problems with medium research, the more I kept coming back to OpenSourceScience, which you recall that I created about a year ago with the vision of solving exactly these kinds of problems. What I saw in OpenSourceScience was there’s a number of new collaborative tools and technologies that are out there and people are using to harness the collective intelligence of a group to solve a problem. I thought that’s a perfect fit for what we’re trying to do here. The other promise of open sourcing something is this idea of disintermediation, that is we can take out the middleman. In this case, the middleman is the stuck-in-the-mud academia who really creates a barrier between the stakeholders, who is everyone who’s interested in this kind of research.
So, I kept coming back to this idea of open sourcing and OpenSourceScience, and how to apply this to these experiments. When I reframed the problem in that way, I came up with four really driving forces that reshaped how I thought about this experiment, and now play into what has evolved into the medium experiment that I’m going to tell you about and that we’re to do initially with the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe folks; then beyond that, maybe with some universities down the road. So, here are the four factors that really were primary to driving the way that I designed this experiment.
The first is that it has to be good science. At the end of the day, what you do has to be tightly controlled, verifiable, reproducible, and meaningfully contribute to this body of knowledge that we can science. So, that’s the first order of business. But at the same time, I got to interject that that is not that hard. I mean, we’re not splitting atoms here. What we’re doing is basically survey work. I think we have to resist the urge to make these experiments more complicated or appear more complicated that they need to be.
That drive towards simplicity is really my second guiding force in this experiment, and that is it had to be simple. As I see it, that’s been one of the biggest failings of the previous research that had been done. If you read some of these research that’s been done on psychics or mediums, you start getting into these other topics like superpsyc or optimizing for hypothesized discarnates. I just read this, and something at the back of my head just kept going, “Wait a minute, the elephant in the corner here is that none of your peers are willing to publicly admit that any of these stuff has any chance of being real.” So, why go on with all the possibilities, implications, alternative theories? Until we’ve simply, plainly and repeatedly isolated that there’s some phenomena here to study.
Let me put it in another way. Any experiment we might do about mediums is really an experiment that challenges the idea that people can communicate, that is passed information back and forth, in a way other than our five senses. So before you go start labeling this experiment or any experiment as medium communication, psychometry, voodoo or whatever, realize that the fundamental, scientific question is, “Is anomalous communication possible?” I think when we become really clear about that, I think it simplifies the experiment greatly and it allows you to make a lot of simplifying assumptions about the experiment.
Now, onto guiding design force number three. This is less obvious but so important, and that’s speed. A medium experiment has to be fast. By that, I mean we have to substantially reduce the time it takes to design these experiments, to run these experiments, to publish the results. I say the importance of this is less obvious because there are really two factors that play here. There’s one side that says, “Hey, wait a minute, slow down. Get it right, don’t make any mistakes,” and there is another side, this hype that I’m on that says, “Look, I’ve now been at this for awhile and I’ve spoken with a number of mediums who are completely frustrated with the research they’ve participated in. One of the reasons is because it’s taken so long. They’ve participated a year or even two years ago, they’ve never hear any feedback, they’ve never gotten any results. There’s no feedback, there’s no improvement.” The same is true with participants. I’ve spoken with participants who were open to being involved and felt like the research’s heart was in the right place, but the loop was never closed. There was never this give and take feedback. That feedback loop also comes into play with the folks who oppose this research, both for the right reasons and the wrong reasons. If it’s taking you five years to design your study and publish your study, how responsive can you be when someone points out a flaw that you’ve made in the design? Are you supposed to say, “Wait another five years and I’ll get back to you.”
Speed is critical in this. It keeps everyone engaged, everyone from mediums to participants, to those stakeholders who are interested in observing it, and finally it makes it easier to respond to criticism. Let’s face it, whether you make mistakes or not, the research is going to be criticized because it’s a taboo subject that really jolts a lot of people, as we’ve seen. You have to be able to respond to that, and the best way to respond to that is with more experiments. You can only do more experiments if you have short cycle that you can repeat.
Simplicity and speed lead to the last point, and that’s cheap. The Internet has tuned the cost structure for information processing upside down. Since this experiment is all about information processing, there’s just no good reason why we can’t design a medium experiment that’s very cost effective to carry out using Internet technologies. That’s really a must, especially if you plan to move this research into the university because the universities stare for cash and you got to figure you’re going to be the one funding this research, and a lower cost makes it a lot easier to fund multiple research projects.
So, with those ideas in mind, those driving forces, let me tell you a little bit about the medium experiment that we’ve designed and then how we’d like you to get involved and participate in this. The first thing we needed are participants, sitters, and that are folks who wanted to connect with a deceased person in their life. I would say loved one, but it’s not always a loved one they want to connect with. Now for seeking participants, we had a very simple methods, we used adds in Craigslist, primarily. That had a couple of really nice benefits to go with it. One, we were able to target geographically. So, we were able to run ads in Los Angels, Dallas, Boston and Miami, get a cross-section of different people from around the country. It was also fast. Craigslist is super fast, within a couple of days you get responses. Even with a lot of responses, but you just rerun your ad and you can keep getting more and more responses. Again, there’s that cycle time.
So, I was constantly modifying, changing the ad based on feedback, and I was able to do that because Craigslist has a very fast cycle time. So, the ads on Craigslist directed folks to fill out an online survey that we set up. In the survey, we asked them a bunch of information about the person they were trying to connect with. At the end, we asked them to call a Google voicemail box and leave a message so that we have a recording of their voice to give to the medium. All these, fast, cheap, simple. So participants really didn’t turn out to be a problem for this experiment. When this experiment is rerun with the folks at Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe and with our university partners, I anticipate that they’ll use the same method because it really works well and I already have all the ads down and all the little tricks of how to do that.
Now the next thing we needed of course was the actual online experiment. Here we made a couple of decisions that relate back to some earlier points I was mentioning and turned out to be really important. The first one has to do with this sensory or information leakage, that is how do we prevent the medium from knowing things that they’re not supposed to know. First off, moving this online helps tremendously. You don’t have any of the face-to-face concerns that some of the earlier research did where you’re reading body language or anything like that. You don’t even have any of the problems with the phone reading where people are answering and giving yes or no answers. Move it online, and the way that we did that is just by proving an online clip that plays through the Internet of the recording that we mentioned earlier where the sitter says something like, “Hi, my name is Alex, I’m taking part in a medium experiment and I’m trying to connect with Sarah.” Very simple, that’s recorded, placed on the experiment, and that’s the only thing that the medium has access to.
Now the second thing we did on the online experiment to control for rater bias was to take the rater completely out of the equation. Another problem in this research that’s been pointed out in the past - and I played this clip earlier - is how do you know that the rater, the sitter, is really accurate in evaluating the reading that the medium has given. How do you really know that they’re scoring that the way they should? We decided then to instead give the medium multiple choice questions that match up with the targeted deceased people they’re trying to connect with. Again, very simple, very fast, very clean.
So we had participants, we had an online experiment. The next thing finally that we needed was mediums of course. So we used online sources to identify mediums, and asked them to run through a couple of trials of this experiment with the understanding that we’d see if they were really a good fit for what we’re doing. Then we’d select just a few of them to be the final mediums that we use in this experiment. That process is still underway, but it’s gone very, very well. So, that’s basically the experiment.
Now as I mentioned, I had a chance earlier in the week to talk to Steve Novella about this. I ran these ideas past him and we spoke about how we could collaborate with the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe community and run this experiment. One of the first ways that we can collaborate and work together – and this is not just for the Skeptic’s Guide folks but also for all you skeptical listeners, too, certainly – has to do with testing this information leakage thought that I just had a minute ago. So, we had this online experiment, and in this online experiment you’ll click a button and you’ll hear a recoding of the sitter. Then you’ll have these multiple choice answers. Now these multiple choice answers says that the person’s young, died this way, other information. So, what we want you to do is spot the where the information leakage is, if it’s there. What we want you to do is use logic and deduction to see if you can connect the recording to the answers. Do the names give something away or the accents or the sound of voice? Do they give you hints that help you to decide which answer is correct.
It’s really simply, but it’s really an important way that you can contribute and make this research better. I’ll provide the link for this in the Skeptiko show notes on the Skeptiko website. Please, I invite you to give it a try. Your contribution would a help in doing so.
Now there’s one more aspect in this experiment that I need to mention, and it’s an important one because it relates to our guest today, Janice Ervin. Janice is a hospice volunteer whose work with the grieving led her to really digging into and working with mediums and medium communication. It turns out, that connection between working with folks who are dying and/or folks who’ve recently lost someone and having a belief in afterlife communication, that connection is not at all uncommon among professionals who work in this area. In fact, it’s more or less accepted if not publicly acknowledged. So, think about that for a minute. I mean, really wrap your arms around the disconnect here. Go talk to your neurologist or psychiatrist about afterlife communication, and they’d want to hook you up to a machine and figure out what’s wrong with you. But go back and talk to a doctor or a nurse who works in hospice, that is works with people at the end of their life. They’ll tell you that that same afterlife communication thing is commonplace. Then maybe again, this disconnect might be a good thing because it might just be the path in that I was looking for, at least I hope so.
One of the things I want to do with this research experiment is move it into the university setting. Maybe a way to do that is to target university departments that train healthcare professionals and counselors who work with folks who are in the grieving process because they might just be a little bit more open to this stuff. So maybe it was a coincidence that Janice Ervin contacted me about helping with Skeptiko and wound up being both a hospice worker and someone who had extensive experience working with mediums. I don’t know if it was, but if it was, it sure was a lucky one.
Coming up, my interview with Janice Ervin and more on our medium experiment.
(scoring)
(Start of interview with Janice Ervin)
Alex: Janice, thanks so much for joining me today on Skeptiko. We’ve had so many conversations and e-mail exchanges over the last couple of months. I thought this would be a great opportunity to introduce you to our Skeptiko listeners and talk a little bit more about the experiment that we’re undertaking here on the mediumship.
Janice: Hi, Alex. Thank you.
Alex: I’m here looking at your website, JaniceErvin.com and at your bio, but I thought you could do a better job than I could of maybe telling us just a little bit about your background and what it is that you do.
Janice: Well, I am a hospice volunteer and a vigil service volunteer for Hospice of the Chesapeake in Maryland. I’m also a para-physic event coordinator. I’ve enjoyed an interesting - I guess you could call it - parallel through the year. I served in the army during 70’s, early 80’s. I finished up my tour of the National Security Agency in Maryland. I set down roots there to raise a family and I spent the next 20 years working in the private sector. Meanwhile though, as the parallel, I had been raised in a very Orthodox home provided with full structure for belief systems, but I always seemed to have more questions than answers regarding the nature of existence. So, I was interested in death and the dying process, and continued that curiosity through the years regarding the validity for continuation of consciousness. It wasn’t enough to have been told that I would live on after death. I was interested for finding evidence for myself.
Alex: So tell us a little bit about those events, what they’re for, who they reach and what they’re about.
Janice: I can tell you that they rebirth in my home. I started talking to people who were bereaved, people who were in grieve. I started receiving phone calls and became involved in the hospice. I came across three mothers who had each lost a son at approximately the same age, and it seemed important to get these three mothers together. It just occurred to me that they could each benefit from sharing with one another, talking to someone who was of like situations heart wise at that point. So, one of the mothers had asked me to invite a medium. In my research and in my study, I had come across a medium who I felt would be a benefit to these individuals. So, the three mothers came together with the medium in my home. What turns out as just the four of them ended up being words were spread, and it ended up being in a situation where for the next four days I held a revolving door. People just came and went. People heard about it and wanted to come and talk and share. It was such a cathartic set of days.
It was just so validating to me that this could make a difference, that being with one another and asking questions and sharing, even bringing the mediumship when there’s a death. It seems to bring in the questions that we hadn’t previously seriously possibly thought about. So, this was their chance to do that, hold that forum, in a place they felt safe. So, that’s how I birth my event organization.
Alex: Great. So, it really evolved out of this desire to serve and help those who are in grief, which is quite amazing because then you contacted me and we got to talking. I thought it was just an amazing coincidence, if those things do exist, that you were so knowledgeable about both mediumship because you had worked with so many mediums in helping people who were overcoming grief and in the bereavement process. Therefore you also had that background in grief. So, we kind of decided to join forces and you’ve helped me a great deal in putting together this experiment. So what I thought we might do today real briefly is talk a little bit about what we’re doing here at OpenSourceScience to try and put together an experiment that looks at this anomalous communication that happens between mediums and those who are bereaved. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the process that we’ve gone through in trying to recruit mediums for this experiment?
Janice: There are so many wonderful individuals, practitioners, in this field. We’re trying I know to target individuals that have been working on the field awhile, are able to work in remote, removed situations as opposed to having an individual sit in front of them, someone of who is comfortable under extra pressure. Always being a medium there’s pressure, always those who are cynical or skeptical. So, that’s one more facet. The responsibility facet can’t be overlooked, there’s great responsibility attached to this field. You’re working with individuals who are suffering mentally, cognitively, emotionally, physically, spiritually. In so many ways, they’re hurting. So, it’s very important that we have individuals involved in this process who understand that, can emphasize with that and know how to communicate well with someone who’s bereaved.
Alex: Yes, there’s so many good points that you touched on there, and I think that this process of getting to know these mediums myself has been a very interesting one for me. If I could just touch on a couple of things that you’re saying; one, I’ve think we’ve done well to kind of seek mediums that have the right heart, their heart is in the right place in terms of doing this work because so many time they are dealing with people who are experiencing grief in one form or another. The other thing that you touched on that we found is that all mediums have different ways of working. In the experiments that we’ve designed, it’s not necessarily optimized for all mediums. As a matter of fact, it’s quite challenging. I have to say just the last thing that you touched on that I wanted to emphasize is, I am amazed at how humble so many of these mediums are, almost to the point of being less than confident about their abilities. I think that stands in contrast to a skeptical perspective that a lot of times sees these people as some of the folks that you see on TV who are kind of exaggerated characters of mediums that are of this super confident “I know everything, I can do everything.” So many people I’ve encountered are so humble and so respectful, and in this state of mystery about what their gift is and how they’re able to do this – if you accept that it’s a gift.
After been through, at this point, dozens and dozens of readings for people have volunteered for this experiment, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that these people are somehow accessing real information in bringing that through. But that’s maybe really tipping out hand a little bit too much about what will come in the experiment, and we obviously won’t know what comes in the experiment until we get all the way through, which is the next point that I really want to talk about. I thought we might just kind of have a conversation back and forth about what we’ve done up-to-date and how we envision taking this experiment forward. So, do you want to maybe start that conversation?
Janice: First, if it’s okay, I’d like to interject that I really see great value in this experiment itself. I believe that the belief systems within the society drive or have the ability to steer many of the facets about society, from studying research right on down to initiating or engaging in work. It just seems that death is a natural fundamental aspect to our existence. It’s one that leaves such emotional even physical destruction in its wake. So, why wouldn’t we want to study something that is so important, so fundamental and so part of what all these will experience? So, I just had to tell you that I really firmly believe in this research and the purpose for it.
Alex: Absolutely. If I can just jump in there and say that embedded in what you’re saying is also some of our really kind of weird cultural biases that we have about death, that it does create all these havoc in our lives and all these destruction rather than seeing as a very natural part of the process. I mean, we are all going to die and we know so little about what happens after we died. But at the very least, we seem to want to kind of shove it in the back in terms of not really deal with the dying process.
Janice: Right.
Alex: Let’s talk a little bit about the experiment that we’re doing because the bereavement and the grievement process, it is at the core of the emotional experience that we’re talking about in this experiment. At the same time, we’ve made and I’ve really made a conscious decision to take that out of the experiment. I think too often where this work has been done in the past, scientifically they’ve been sucked into that whole issue of dealing with all those issue surrounding grief and afterlife, all those things. I think what we tried to do here is maybe strip it down to its very, very core essence and just ask the question, “Is there anomalous communication happening when we have this traditional medium encounter?” It’s where someone goes to a medium ad says, “I want to connect with a loved one, here’s their name, what can you tell me?” So, what we’re asking is just a question; when that happens, is it possible that there’s any anomalous cognition, anomalous communication going on?
Janice: That’s why the research is so important. It has to be stripped, it has to be unbias, it has to be separated.
Alex: Let’s tell folks, and they’re going to see it because we’re going to provide them a link. This is particularly a useful link for us as part of the experiment because part of the goal of this process and the goal of OpenSource is to engage with folks who maybe have a different opinion. In this case, it’s our skeptical friends out there. What we’ve done is we’ve designed an experiment that we think is a pretty good model for how to measure whether or not mediums are really accessing any information through anomalous means. We assume that’s through psychic abilities, but we’ll just say in non-traditional ways of knowing. What we’re asking skeptics to do is kind of go through the same process that the mediums are going through, explain if they can answer these same questions about the deceased and their connection to the person who requesting a dialog with them, and if they can explain how they’ve done that through normal means of cognition and normal means of deduction.
Janice: Well, I think it’s wonderful that there are two phases to the experimental link itself. It’s extremely simplistic but covers a lot of ground. The first if just a very, very short snippet of the voice; all the voice provides is just the name of the individual requesting the information, who would be the sitter, and the name of the individual who is no longer here living that they’re hoping to receive information from. That snippet is maybe 10 seconds long.
Alex: We’ve actually lengthened it just a little bit. We had this conversation yesterday and I said I don’t think we need to do it. Since then, I spoke a couple of other mediums who said the same thing. But still, the essence of what you’re saying is exactly right, they just say their name, they say what day it is. Yes, it’s very innocuous; they’re not giving away any information. They’re giving out the least amount of information that we felt we could do and still be effective in this experiment. But again - I can anticipate this - this will be a point that will be raised by some of our skeptical friends out there. That’s why we have our skeptical trail, too, where you can go through and you can listen to that recording. If you’re able through cold reading techniques of somehow being able to determine that that’s revealing some information about description of the deceased – great, have at it, we’d love to hear it. But go ahead, please continue Janice.
Janice: The second phase is a multiple choice phase providing four different personality types which includes the manner of death, the physical description and the personality itself of the individuals of the individuals. From this multiple choice, all the medium needs to is to be able to select which one most correctly applies to the information that they’re receiving.
Alex: Let me interject there because I’d state that slightly differently. Those are actually all the words that appear in the multiple choices, they’re gleaned from surveys that sitters actually filled out. We went out and asked for participants for this experiment. We asked folks who have experience the loss of someone who they wanted to connect with to come in and fill out a survey, and they fill out a bunch of information. Then what we did is we tried to distill their answers down into information that would give a description of the deceased, but not in a way that would connect with any of the other information that they’ve give, particularly their name or that little recording that we have there. Again, that would be folks to judge if we’ve done a fair job of that. But I think that they are very, very generalized descriptions. The one other point I just wanted to ask is while it may seem rather easy to do that matching, the odds that someone will correctly match all four recordings to all four descriptions is about 1 in 24, and the odds that you would do that two times in a row is more than 1 and 500. Again, have at it those who are critical of the notion that mediums really are able to do this. Have your turn at it and see if you can do it.
Janice: There’s also an open area where the individuals who tries this protocol will have the opportunity to fill in any additional information that they would like to add.
Alex: Right. For the skeptics, what we’re asking is that you fill the reasons we want you to provide. Certainly, just by guessing alone, certain percentage of people will get the right answer. That’s useful to know if folks are able to do that. But what’s more useful is for you to provide your logical reasons, your powers of deduction that you use to arrive at your answer.
Janice: Exactly. May have you hear an accent of some sort and assume a situation correlates with that, from the teeny little voice that you have an opportunity to hear. It’s very simple but it’s also effective. What it means is that anybody anywhere can get tot heir computer, and within 10-15 minutes can provide their summations and send them in.
Alex: Right. Then to kind of finish this up, we got to tell folks where we plan to go with this, and that’s that we’re running these trials now. The next phase is then to partner up with several universities who we’ve contacted and see if they will join forces with us in taking this pilot into kind of a more serious academic research phase, with them providing the information in and us providing the mediums to kind of do the work. Okay, Janice, we have a lot to do. So we better wrap up this conversation and get to it.
Janice: Sounds very good to me.
Alex: Thanks for all your help and in joining me. Was there anything else that maybe I’ve left out that we wanted to touch on?
Janice: No, nothing as far as the experiment, I think that was pretty concise. I believe in what we’re doing, I’m just as curious to see what the results show. But I do believe in what we’re doing, I know that I see examples everyday. I see it in my work. I see it at my events. I see it with the attendees, when the mediums are there and they’re giving them unbelievable, evidential, information, one piece right on top of another. So, I’m extremely curious to see how this rolls out.
Alex: Thanks for joining us again. I’m going to make sure that everyone checks out your website and the new video that you have up on helping folks in the grieving process. It’s very, very great stuff at JaniceErvin.com. Thanks, Janice.
Janice: Take care, Alex.
(End of interview with Janice Ervin)
Alex: Thanks again to Janice Ervin for joining me today on Skeptiko. If you’d like more information about this how, including of course the link that I was describing earlier, please check out the show notes on our website, that’s Skeptiko.com. You’ll also find links to all our previous show, a link to our forum and an e-mail link where you could drop me a note if you like. That’s going to do it for today. As you can tell, we’re going to have much more on this topic coming up, so stay with us for that. Until then, bye for now.
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