Episode 54: Halloween special on psychic mediums

WoooOOOOOoooOOOOOoooo, it’s that time of year again! It’s Halloween, so it’s time for The Studies Show hosts to face their fears, and read the research from one of the weirdest areas of science, parapsychology.

This time it’s all about psychic mediums. What does it mean to test whether someone can talk to the dead? Are we any better at doing it now than we were 100 years ago at the height of “spiritualism”? And what do the most recent results tell us about the existence of the afterlife?

Happy Halloween! 🎃

This week, The Studies Show is brought to you by Semafor, the online newletter service that gives you everything you need to know about politics, business, economics, and much more in the form of email newsletters. This week we talked about Ben Smith’s newsletter on a topic that’s just as scary as Halloween: the US Presidential Election. You can find it and more excellent newsletters at www.semafor.com/newsletters.

Show notes

* Alfred Russel Wallace’s “Defence of Modern Spiritualism”

* Article on Darwin’s views on spiritualism

* Peter Lamont’s book on Daniel Dunglas Home

* Sarcastic sceptical article on William Crookes’s botched investigation of Home

* Video of James Randi debunking the medium Peter Popoff

* Ray Hyman’s classic paper on cold reading

* 2021 meta-analysis on mediumship

* New Italian mediumship paper from 2022

* 2023 review on “Is Biological Death Final?” with discussion of the Drake Equation for parapsychology

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.