A Psychic Dog?
Back in 1994 a television company claimed a dog called 'Jaytee' could psychically sense when its owner returned home. And they had some evidence to back up their claim.
One TV crew was sent out with Jaytee's owner while she walked around her home town and the other stayed at home with Jaytee. The cameras showed that just as the dog's owner turned to go home, Jaytee got up and went to the porch and remained there until she returned.
Perhaps this dog really was psychic.
Professor Richard Wiseman, our resident king of weird psychology studies, though, thought there were a number of alternative explanations (Wiseman, Smith & Milton, 1998). Could it be that Jaytee was responding to:
- Routine - has the dog learnt its owner's routine?
- Can the dog smell its owner at a distance?
- Is the dog picking up cues from those it is with?
- Does the dog just keep guessing, hoping it will get it right once, just like someone performing a 'cold reading'?
There's only one way to be sure:
Proper experiments
In four experiments carried out in 1995, Wiseman and colleagues set about testing Jaytee's abilities using the strictest controls:
- Jaytee's owner's return was randomly controlled by the random number generator on a Casio calculator.
- No one in the home was aware at what time Jaytee's owner would return.
- Jaytee's behaviour was videotaped.
- Jaytee's owner was not permitted to travel in her own car to avoid the possibility the dog could identify the engine approaching.
- The indication of psychic ability - a trip to the porch - was only considered successful if made within 10 minutes of Jaytee's owner's return.
- An independent judge viewed the tape of Jaytee's behaviour to decide if Jaytee was visiting the porch for some other reason - such as to stare at a passing cat.
Unfortunately for Jaytee with the experimental safeguards in place all four trials were a bust for the briefly famous dog. It seemed Jaytee didn't have a clue when his owner was coming home.
Attempts to reanalyse the results of the TV company's experiment were also unsuccessful as the tapes of Jaytee's behaviour had been lost.
It seems the investigation of canine psychic abilities follows exactly the same story arc as similar investigations into humans. Initial excitement and media interest is soon dampened by those plodding killjoys: scientists. Determined, as they are to wring all mystery out of the universe.
And thank goodness for that!
» Read more weird psychology studies.
Reference
Wiseman, R., Smith, M., & Milton, J. (1998). Can animals detect when their owners are returning home? An experimental test of the'psychic pet'phenomenon. Br J Psychol, 89(Pt 3), 453-62.
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You know, in my less astute moments, I have wondered why I'm not invited to parties. Thank you for reminding me.
Damned scientists with your insistence on observable, repeatable measurements. Why can't you take it easy and just trust us once in a while?
After all, there's big money in faith healing, fortune telling, and other such "psychic" gambits.
Actually, the debunking by Wiseman is not that convincing as well.
There's some more serious discussion on the topic of this experiment at Sleptiko forum's discussion on dogs that know.
Also, there's now beginning an independent research to verify the existence of this phenomena at OpenSourceScience.net. Another site for same experiment is http://dogsthatknow.com/
Isn't it possible that psychic phenomenon is dampened under observation? Especially by skeptics?
If there are several minds bent on proving a thing wrong, couldn't the energy spent by them against the process actively prevent psychic powers from working?
Mind over matter and all. More energy being spent to prove it wrong might be making it impossible to prove anything else.
Not sure if this kind of thing can ever be proven.
my 2 cents.
Chris,
the issue is not whether it is provable, but rather whether it is refutable (that is, disprovable).
The way science works, we have operating theories that are refutable, and the longer they withstand competing theories, the greater our confidence in them (although that confidence never reaches 100%).
The problem with almost all of the "psychic" research and the line of reasoning that psychic effects are dampened by negative/skeptical thoughts (and strangely, for those in the psychic crowd, "skepticism" = "negativity", which for me speaks for itself) is that there is no way to disprove it. The claim is made, and there it sits.
The big elephant in the room that no one discusses is the manner in which we determine "significance" in scientific terms, that is, the 5% cutoff (p < .05). What this means is that just by chances, 1 in 20 research studies is going to demonstrate statistic significance, and that includes studies on psychic phenomena. Sure, in this study, the dog got up and went to the door when the master rounded the corner. My question is how many iterations of the observations were made? How many non-significant results were found?
Scientists trying to determine if something is methodical and not just occuring by chance doesn't necessarily mean that they are skeptics. There are many scientists who would love to prove psychic phenomena.
So the whole negative energy thing would be questionable until you polled the researchers on their belief.
Plus what about when one observer is sent into a crowd of many believers- is he enough to undo all their "positive energy?"
An example of that would be a filmmaker trying to film a group of people levitating in lotus position.
Actually Wiseman's data correspond exactly with Sheldrake's. Wiseman conducted 4 trials (not 4 experiments) and Sheldrake more than 100. But if you plot the data from Wiseman's 4 trials on Sheldrake's graph, you can see that Wiseman's trials do not refute Sheldrake's thesis, but rather confirm it.
This is all very easily researched online, and even Wiseman now admits that his data matched Sheldrake's.
M.C.,
Here's Sheldrake's commentary on Wiseman.
This is the sort of thing that makes me throw up my hands about skeptic/credent debates. Someone here is full of bullshit, and if I knew who it was I would dismiss them from all future consideration - but I don't know who it is.
Oops, the promised link:
http://www.sheldrake.org/controversies/wiseman.html
Anon, I think the most frustrating thing about the argument about psy phenomena is that neither side is full of it - both are telling the truth, as they see it.
The problem is, as Dr G says, that you can't prove something doesn't exist - you can only prove it does exist.
In this experiment proving the dog is psychic comes down to making a judgement about which of the dog's behaviours should be considered evidence that it is psychic.
This is why two people can look at the same evidence - as it appears they have done here - and come to radically different conclusions. So, M. C., the fact that Wiseman and Sheldrake agree their data corresponds doesn't necessarily mean only one of them is right about the interpretation.
The same thing happens in lots of psychology experiments. People do the same experiment and get different results then argue vehemently for their own interpretation. Then they set up their own experiments to prove their own point of view is correct.
Ultimately the view that usually wins is the one that has the most evidence to back it up. Or at least that's the way it works in theory.
The only way for this question about this dog to be resolved is to do more experiments on the dog. This time everyone should agree on the criteria for psychic phenomena beforehand.
Then, if there's one psychic dog, there are probably more - so lets do the same experiment on other dogs.
The reason this won't happen is that the majority of people, including me, would consider this process of experimentation a gigantic waste of time.
But that's just my personal view.
Jaytee died three years ago. According to Sheldrake, he was an outstandingly psychic dog. Also it would be time-consuming to re-run the test with another animal. However, the tapes Pam Smart and Sheldrake made of Jaytee are still available, and could be studied and scored. (Only the tapes of the TV show that publicized Jaytee are missing.)
In particular, a skeptic could test if anyone could predict when Pam had started to return home from the dog’s pattern of waiting-by-the porch at a better than chance level. If a few randomly chosen students say) couldn’t do so, he’d have proved the claim of Wiseman that the dog exhibited no pattern of behavior that predicted Pam’s return. OTOH, if his testees were all very successful, as I expect, he’d have falsified Wiseman’s claim. (Testees should be offered a reward for successful prediction, and should be randomly chosen, to eliminate “ringers.”)
It would be time well spent to help determine if psi is real. And it would be a little spare change out of a scoftic’s pockets.
Wiseman attempted to debunk a claim that was made on a TV show, not the claim in the entirety of Sheldrake's earlier and more thorough work, which hadn’t been published at that point. One of the announcers had apparently claimed or implied that Jaytee almost infallibly signaled Pam's return by going to the porch, and this is what gave Wiseman his target to debunk. He didn't debunk the entire pattern of Jaytee’s behavior, although when speaking to audiences of skeptics and to the press he and his co-authors claimed that he had done so. (“We tried the best we could to capture this ability and we didn’t find any evidence to support it” (Smith); “When we put it to the test, what’s going on is normal not paranormal” (Wiseman).)
Jaytee's psychic behavior was indicated by her staying on the porch more than 2/3 of the time during the period Pam was returning home, as opposed to less than 10% of the time prior to the start of Pam's return. This is explained in a post on the Skeptico site by davidsmith73, here: http://forum.mind-energy.net/skeptiko-podcast/24-can-dogs-know-podcast.html#post1571
Here are some selected sentences from it: "Wiseman et al are posing a different hypothesis to Sheldrake. They are saying that any telepathic ability of Jaytee should necessarily be reflected in the first trip [of two minute's length] to the porch. ... We have no reason to think that normal psychological processes should not operate in parallel with psi ... [as a part of which ] Jaytee always goes to the porch [briefly]…."
Hi Roger, thanks for your comment and just one point on what you say. Some excellent scientists have already devoted much time and effort to trying to prove psi exists with little to show for it. Susan Blackmore is one example. In this short piece from 'The Edge' she describes her conversion from believer to sceptic.
Here is quote from her:
"The way I really think is more like this "I am a scientist. I think the way to the truth is by investigation. I suspect that telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis and life after death do not exist because I have been looking in vain for them for 25 years. I have been wrong lots of times before and am not afraid of it"."
Hi Jeremy,
Further research than Blackmore's article would turn up some surprising findings. Rick Berger examined Blackmore's claims, finding "the claim of 'ten years of psi research' actually represents a series of hastily constructed, executed, and reported studies that were primarily conducted during a 2-year period." Further, seven of her twenty-one published experiments produced statistically significant results for psi - however, Blackmore filtered her results and explained positive results as being 'flawed', and negative results as being from sound experiments. Berger doesn't claim this as evidence for psi though, commenting...
"Blackmore's claims that her database shows no evidence for psi are unfounded, because the vast majority of her studies were carelessly designed, executed, and reported, and in Blackmore's own assessment, individually flawed. As such, no conclusions should be drawn from this database."
Hi MachineElf, thanks for your comment. Maybe Rick Berger is right, I don't know; but we still end up back where we were, waiting for positive evidence.
I'd be very interested to know what are considered the most convincing results pointing to the existence of psi. Anybody?
On a related note, there was of course Oscar, the lolcat of death.
Unfortunately the obvious explanation in that case was Oscar was sleeping on their faces,