ImprobableJoe
New Member
I can see the future!! This thread is going to get locked.
Where's my million dollars? :lol:
Where's my million dollars? :lol:
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I'm psychic
- Thread starter Worldquest
- Start date
australopithecus
Active Member
ImprobableJoe said:
You can have it when and only when the thread is locked. We must be consistent after all
ImprobableJoe
New Member
I don't see why I should have to demonstrate my knowledge! WAAAAAHHHH!!australopithecus said:You can have it when and only when the thread is locked. We must be consistent after all
Have you tested it by writting something that you're NOT hearing, something rather vague, horoscope-like, and then showing it to them, to see if they confirmed it as well? Have you kept a statistic registry of how many times they confirm it and how many times they fail? What's what you write down, something specific like their password of hotmail, or something general like "Oh my fucking God" or "I'd wish she was here"? And more important, have you written it down, then heard what they were saying, and THEN let a third party compare the previously written text with the actual spoken words, instead of showing them the words and leave their memory to reconstruct the situation?Worldquest said:
If that's true, you shouldn't have any problem in search for the witness that Randi will ask you for. So go on, apply for the preliminary. Even if you don't want to use it to win money, you always can donate it to a charity.
RichardMNixon
New Member
Baranduin said:
That's what you really need, make it double blind. Your readees could be just as subject to confirmation bias as you are.
Also, this is hardly my field, but thought processes in the brain strike me as a lot more complex than thinking in sentences, you know? It's almost like a wavefunction... - of possible ways to collect my thoughts - that collapses when the pen hits the paper, so I'm not sure how these people were thinking specific words that you got.
Unfortunately, Randi had too many quacks and nutters over the years to deal with, so he now only accepts challenge applicants with some measure of media exposure. I guess fooling the morning news host is the pre-pre-test.
So Worldquest, contact your local news station, tell them you'll read their minds, and you'll be well on your way to failing that $1 million challenge.
JustBusiness17
New Member
Worldquest said:
<Wow, I must be psychic... I wrote down what the posters above were thinking before I even read their comments :roll: >
The fact that it only works on people you know means its untestable and further bolsters my case that you're good at reading people.
When you say "word for word", what does that even mean? Most people don't formulate their ideas in sentence format during conversation. If you happened to guess 2 or 3 words, it could be considered a "hit" by your logically impaired onlookers.
The other thing is, if you're going to continue this claim, you need to disclose your success rate. I know of compulsive gamblers who believe they're pros because they only focus on their wins. That's why I brought up confirmation bias. Why don't you grab a stack of 100 3x5" cards and sit down with a friend for a day. I guarantee that you'll be surprised at how often you're wrong when you start to add up the failure pile.
Seriously dude, get over yourself. I've finished off the end of a million sentences in my lifetime. I've read people's facial expressions and figured out what was on their minds through familiarity and background knowledge too many times to count. The human face and body language is he most expressive in the entire animal kingdom. 90% of communication is non-verbal and millions of years of evolution has embedded instinctual abilities to decipher those messages with impressive accuracy. You can't fake a smile because it's impossible to replicate the full expression without genuinely experiencing the emotions involved. Whether you know it or not, your subconscious thought processes are continuously working in high gear piecing together information before it becomes conscious thought. What you think you're experiencing is nothing more than the amazing circuitry of the human brain.
Don't get me wrong, it sounds like you have an amazing emotional intelligence. It's an extremely valuable asset in many industries! But don't try to fool yourself and label it psychic powers. It demonstrates how piss poor your cognitive intelligence is which is far more valuable than being able to read someone!
If you're honestly convinced beyond all your skeptical abilities (if you even have any), then go visit your nearest University and have a chat with a professor of psychology. If he can't explain the process in scientific terms that you can understand, at least you'll get a free diagnosis for whatever you may be suffering from :geek:
Worldquest
New Member
Baranduin -
It happens when the person is someone that I know well. It doesn't happen when I don't know the person. Also, there has to be a strong emotion between us. For example, an argument, or a really positive chat, as long as there's a strong feeling. So for example, if I'm just talking with someone that I know and neither of us is very angry or very pleased, it doesn't happen. And it doesn't happen with people that I don't know. There have a been a few exceptions to this, but extremely it's extremely rare, so maybe there are other factors but I don't know yet.
Yes, I've tested it by writing down whatever comes into my mind, anything at all, just my thoughts at the time, including things which I'm sure the other person is not thinking. And I've shown it to the other person, and, from what I wrote, they (90-95% of the time) they pick out the same thought that I was sure was theirs, whether I tell them why I wrote the thoughts down and why I'm showing them, or not. I haven't kept any record of how many times they confirm what I felt was their thought, and how many times they haven't, mainly because I very rarely get it wrong, and also I've never felt the need. But roughly speaking, a conservative estimate would be 90-95% accuracy.
The thoughts that I get (and which I write down, but I don't always write them down) are things like sentences mixed with images, half sentences, sounds and images that illustrate sentences, and sometimes I find myself feeling an emotion which comes from the other person, ie if they get angry or really pleased, I feel their emotion for a few seconds, mixed with my own. I can tell the difference between mine and theirs because there is a different feel to it, it doesn't feel like it's my emotion, it feels like I'm playing the part of them for a few seconds.
And I've asked people to think of a number, or an image, or a sentence, and I can know what it is. But it only really works when there's an emotion involved. So to do that, I ask them to think about something that has a strong significance for them, and to get into that emotion. As for passwords and any other information which doesn't involve an emotion in itself, the only way I've had that work is if I get them to think of each letter at a time while creating an emotional connection between them and the letter. For example, if the first word of their password is A, they could think of something meaningful to them which somehow involves that letter. I've done it and it does work but it takes time.
As for telling them what they're thinking, writing it down, showing them, showing a third party, I've done that in every conceivable order and it works.
I'd be very interested to have someone conduct an experiment as long as they understand that I have to know the person and there has to be a strong emotion involved, because I already know that it doesn't work otherwise.
It happens when the person is someone that I know well. It doesn't happen when I don't know the person. Also, there has to be a strong emotion between us. For example, an argument, or a really positive chat, as long as there's a strong feeling. So for example, if I'm just talking with someone that I know and neither of us is very angry or very pleased, it doesn't happen. And it doesn't happen with people that I don't know. There have a been a few exceptions to this, but extremely it's extremely rare, so maybe there are other factors but I don't know yet.
Yes, I've tested it by writing down whatever comes into my mind, anything at all, just my thoughts at the time, including things which I'm sure the other person is not thinking. And I've shown it to the other person, and, from what I wrote, they (90-95% of the time) they pick out the same thought that I was sure was theirs, whether I tell them why I wrote the thoughts down and why I'm showing them, or not. I haven't kept any record of how many times they confirm what I felt was their thought, and how many times they haven't, mainly because I very rarely get it wrong, and also I've never felt the need. But roughly speaking, a conservative estimate would be 90-95% accuracy.
The thoughts that I get (and which I write down, but I don't always write them down) are things like sentences mixed with images, half sentences, sounds and images that illustrate sentences, and sometimes I find myself feeling an emotion which comes from the other person, ie if they get angry or really pleased, I feel their emotion for a few seconds, mixed with my own. I can tell the difference between mine and theirs because there is a different feel to it, it doesn't feel like it's my emotion, it feels like I'm playing the part of them for a few seconds.
And I've asked people to think of a number, or an image, or a sentence, and I can know what it is. But it only really works when there's an emotion involved. So to do that, I ask them to think about something that has a strong significance for them, and to get into that emotion. As for passwords and any other information which doesn't involve an emotion in itself, the only way I've had that work is if I get them to think of each letter at a time while creating an emotional connection between them and the letter. For example, if the first word of their password is A, they could think of something meaningful to them which somehow involves that letter. I've done it and it does work but it takes time.
As for telling them what they're thinking, writing it down, showing them, showing a third party, I've done that in every conceivable order and it works.
I'd be very interested to have someone conduct an experiment as long as they understand that I have to know the person and there has to be a strong emotion involved, because I already know that it doesn't work otherwise.
australopithecus
Active Member
Worldquest said:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
RichardMNixon
New Member
Worldquest said:
So you what, finish their sentences for them? That thing that happens all the time in conversations?
New plan, call your local news crew, bring a close friend, and let the news personality pick things for your friend to make an emotional attachment to. Just promise us if you do and you fail, you won't pull an Uri Geller.
Oooh, goody goody.
Can you only hear the cognition of people when it is in their conscious attention? Or can you also hear everything in their working memory, or even further, right up to long-term?
Do you only hear the cognition associated with the neocortex, or can you catch a drift of all the more primitive functions? There is little relevant distinction, if you can hear their thoughts, you should also be able to know their heartbeat, breathe, and continuous gentle signals for posture in their muscles, along with many others.
Do tell!
Can you only hear the cognition of people when it is in their conscious attention? Or can you also hear everything in their working memory, or even further, right up to long-term?
Do you only hear the cognition associated with the neocortex, or can you catch a drift of all the more primitive functions? There is little relevant distinction, if you can hear their thoughts, you should also be able to know their heartbeat, breathe, and continuous gentle signals for posture in their muscles, along with many others.
Do tell!
)O( Hytegia )O(
New Member
Worldquest said:
Take the challenge. Pocket a million dollars and prove us all wrong.
Ozymandyus
New Member
Nothing psychic about that. We all know generally what other people are thinking and about to say: its how our brains work. We make an effort to model the other person to predict their behavior, so that we can get an advantage in our interaction. I can predict the stuff my wife is thinking or going to say with 90% accuracy or so: it's not because I'm psychic.... I just know her well.
Ok. Let's see. Take your time to investigate every point, though.Worldquest said:
Then you are already doing worse than someone cold-reading.Worldquest said:
I know a lot of things about the people I know; preferences, favorite authors, etc. I also know a lot of things I'm not conscious to know: I know they're going to like that present, even if they never told me, for instance. I even can do some accurate guesses about things like idiomatisms and expressions they use; surely you've seen or experience someone saying "that doesn't seem to be written by him".
We can extrapolate a lot of data from people we know (even if we are unconscious of that, ie, that knowledge is just a hunch). Of course, we can't do it with people we don't know.
That's just a first point. We all have intuitions about other persons; and different persons have them in different degrees. That's how our brains are built, detecting patterns in our surroundings, so there's no surprise there. Your claim (to make sense) should be then that you have higher accuracy and/or they happen fairly more often than for the average person, or than what can be explained with our own systems. If that's not your perception, then you're a troll as your wasting everyone's time. Let's see.
That's a second point. You're narrowing the field: not every thought is an electable thought. There has to be a strong emotion, that is likely being expressed in the face, body's pose, tenseness of the muscles, and half a thousand other traits. And not only visual ones: the tone of the voice, and the expressions they use also vary depending not only of the intensity of the emotion, but also the kind of emotion.Worldquest said:
So if you know that person, and you know that his girlfriend died when he was 15, and then you are speaking about women (or just a group of teenagers passes somewhere close to you, or tomorrow is the anniversary, or a thousand of other events) and he tenses the voice and makes a sad grimace, you don't need superpowers to know he is thinking of her. And if you know the most important memories he has about her, you can even make a very good guess about the trigger and the thought process that has brought him from the trigger to the actual thought.
That can be tested easily keeping a registry of the persons and the accuracy of the predictions. If there's a positive correlation between the degree you know that person and the accuracy of the predictions, then you are not a psychic (the opposite, that if there's no correlation then you are not a psychic, is not true: you may be a psychic, or you may have a very low empathy, or you may know not very well any person at all; further testing should clear that).
Yes, because then you don't have the hints about the emotion the other person is having. That just supports what I've explained in the previous paragraph.Worldquest said:
If you don't know them, you don't know details about possible triggers of emotion, and perhaps you don't even know they're passing through a strong emotional stage. Some persons are more exaggerated and others not. Surely you make more hits the more details you know about that person and the more public their emotions are.Worldquest said:
All that together?Worldquest said:
Confirmation bias is a terrible enemy of you there. If you are presented with a lot of vague statements about your life, and some - few of them - are in some degree - in some vague, low degree - close to describe you, you're likely to accept the full text, even if the things you don't think that describe you are more and in a higher degree than the ones that do (ok, a mess: check Barnum effect).
Check "Cold Reading" and "Hot Reading" (that applies, as you have to know the person). Memory reconstruction is a factor to take into account too.
See Barnum effect above. The other person is always going to confirm you. The experiment should be:Worldquest said:
1) You write what you think the other person is thinking, without the other person seen it.
2) The other person writes what he is thinking, without giving you any clue about it.
3) You two handle your writings to a third person, without any of you seen that and without interchanging information about it - a chat can be useful for that.
4) The third person has to be aware to ignore a possible Barnum Effect. Then, he compares both texts. If we are to be strict, the evaluator can receive "false readings" (done by you to persons you don't know, and done by random, non-psychic persons to other persons) as well, to test also his performance.
5) The evaluation of the "true readings" should be positive and highly superior to the one of the "false readings".
Since you claim that you can write something verbatim, we can rule out that you are going to write any vague statements like "she is thinking in puppets" or "she is thinking in mountains or rivers or something natural"; if that were the case, the whole process is reduced to Barnum Effect.
If you don't keep a registry, numbers are irrelevant. We humans are horrible with statistics.Worldquest said:
Empathy. Nothing that any one hadn't experienced ever.Worldquest said:
Hell, when people cries while watching films, are they reading the minds of inexistent people? Or do you think that Demi Moore was feeling like if Patrick Swayze had totally died in Ghost, and that feeling somehow got recorded in the tape? Was Haley Joel Osment really scared of the still-to-be-rendered CGI dead people?
That requires a bit more of elaboration.Worldquest said:
People are horrible random generators. Not every number has the same chances to appear (for instance, see this). Some numbers are more likely to appear. So you should have higher chances of being right just by guessing at random than a truly random generator.
The fact that you know the person just increase those chances, because you may have observed - even unconsciously - that he tends to chose low prime numbers, but he'll never choose 2 or 19. That's easily testable, though.
You don't mention dates, but that another piece of data to take into account. I've looked for the paper, but I'm unable to find it. Basically, people tend to choose numbers they can remember easily - like birthdays, id numbers, etc - more often than numbers they are not attached to. If he was born 21, May, 1970, "21", "5", "70" or combinations of them are more likely to appear than other numbers.
Or colors. Green, red, blue, are going to appear more often than cyan, purple, emerald, or prusia. And certainly, it's not hard to divine the favorite colors, specially when nurture biases the sample against pinkish colors for men, for instance.
The same goes for sentences. We don't use words, structures and expressions at random, but tend to prefer ones over others. And some people is prone to "catch" those expressions from other persons. So being able to get some accuracy in sentence guessing is not incredible, and happens fairly often. Indeed, what stranges me is that you can't do sentence guessing with people you only know superficially. Heck, you know I'm skeptic, it's a fair assumption that if I think in a sentence it's going to be related to that. My nickname could be used also to guess sentences. And I'm spaniard, so "En un lugar de la Mancha" is going to be far more often in my mind than a lot of other expressions. So you should be able, right now, to guess about me - and about many others - better than you could do just by chance.
Images. They are fairly tricky, as we don't think in highly detailed images, but tend to focus parts and blur the rest, and reconstruct those images as we need them. Have you tried with Zener Cards? Do it.
Either way, a 80% is a really high number. Contact experts in the area and submit your ability to controlled, double blind trials, with a statistical registry. That's fair easy to do.
Look at the process:Worldquest said:
- Persons have events that are very significant for their lives, events less significant, neutral events, and irrelevant events.
- We tend to remember more significant events than irrelevant ones. Also, significant events have had, usually, far more consequences than irrelevant events.
- We tend to speak more about what we consider more relevant about us.
Do you agree with the previous three points? Then you have to agree that, if you know a person, that person has probably spoken about the most relevant memories, probably many times, so you have plentiful of details about them.
As I pointed before, personally chosen passwords tend to have an emotional attachment. We tend to choose things we are more prone to remember. Personally chosen passwords should represent no problem for you. You should be able to hack all the hotmail accounts of your friends, without any fail. You're not? Then that's a point against youWorldquest said:
Password guessing is a very standard procedure and a very good way of testing - you can't just ignore the misses.This is not what I was looking for, but it's enough. Sections on cracking by dictionary and cracking by guessing.
Yeah, and I suppose that Unicode users have to be toughest than just ascii ones, right?Worldquest said:
Indeed, that seems to be a good testing method. Let's take an arabian user, who is going to be "emotionally attached" to an arabic keyboard, and see if your guessing is better than random. That of course if you don't understand arabian nor know any arabian language. If you do, what about chinese?
I doubt you've done so with an appropriate control. I've already explained what I think is going on - my other hypothesis is that you're just trolling and being dishonest -, but if you don't trust us or you're still thinking that you are a psychic, we've already hinted to you what most of us would accept as a proof of it. Heck, it's a million dollars!Worldquest said:
If you want to test it, surely people in the UK can tell you whom you can ask; if you prefer to contact spaniards, just tell me or contact either ARP-SAPC or CàrculoEscéptico (by the way, the video in the first page of CE is worth watching, perhaps that way you'll understand why we don't believe in dragons but we don't believe in no dragons). They'll probably send you some material to read or watch before taking you seriously (and hope no kind words), as they receive similar claims by scammers and delusional people every day in their blogs and mails (usually not in kind words). You're certainly not the first one (and I'd say, why do you always come with so similar stories? Either the world is full of psychics that can't read what the other psychic is reading, or we just have to accept that the same (and natural) mechanisms are working in there).Worldquest said:
PS. BTW, do you frequent Magonia? Just askin'
PS2. C'mon, guys, if he is wrong he has a serious problem of confirmation bias and self-delusion. If he is right, he is going to have them in future, when he start learning about supar-sirius-supar-sikrit projects. It's all a problem, no matter how you put it.
RichardMNixon
New Member
Watch some videos by Derren Brown, he does some much more impressive things than what you've claimed, and he's the first to admit it's nothing supernatural.